Well under either case, budget or how it was spent, it still belongs to the Dimm-o-craps. The came up with the budget and their administration spent the money.Quote:
Originally Posted by boutons_deux
Also Obama run on fixing the VA....remember?
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Well under either case, budget or how it was spent, it still belongs to the Dimm-o-craps. The came up with the budget and their administration spent the money.Quote:
Originally Posted by boutons_deux
Also Obama run on fixing the VA....remember?
the annual deficit has been DECREASING under Obama faster than anytime since WW2.Quote:
Originally Posted by xrayzebra
The Repugs, esp the House's Repug scrotum sucking extremists, wouldn't ever approve a Dem budget anyway, unless they amended it with sociopathic screw-the-poor, protect/enrich the corps/wealthy. I'm sure Obama and Dems know that.
Just look a clownish Ryan's last 4 budgets and his DEBT increasing budget projections for next 10 years.
So the Repugs and you rednecks assholes here whining about "no Obama budget" is just another fake outrage to distract from your total misgovernance and distracting, obstructing witch-hunting. iow, GFY
boutons with the name-calling bads :lol... rednecks, repugs, etc. he is still foolishly missing the point that the need for wait lists (as a result of funding, or lack thereof, etc) has nothing to do with cheating wait lists, which further endangers lives. you can stomp your feet about the lack of funding due to your administration refusing to pass a budget or refusing to adequately fund the VA hospitals, but it has nothing to do with the fact that wait lists are being cheated, which is an epidemic that will likely spread to other hospitals if they want to be government run one day
Didn't both Republicans and Democrats vote to go into both Iraq and Afghanistan? Just askin'.
I'm not excusing the cheating.Quote:
Originally Posted by spurraider21
I'm saying the cheating arose due to lack of FINANCING to meet huge increase in vet health care from the Repugs' two bogus, botched wars.
America is saccharine, tearful, respectfucl with the adoration, glorification of all things murderous military, FREEDOM! MARANS! America Number One!, but when it comes to spending tax dollars, fuck the vets.
$Ts in corporate Welfare for the MIC and their investors? yawn.
Ah, yes, BOTh parties voted for AUMF and the Repug LIES about Iraq. :lol EQUIVALENCE, perfect EQUIVALENCE. Dems are just as bad as the Repugs. :lol
this thread was about the cheating of waitlists, which you are once again deflecting from
There They Go Again! yawn
GOP Hypocrites Call Vets Benefits Too Expensive But Want a $600 Billion Tax Cut for Business
Senate Republicans blocked a $21 billion plan to build new VA clinics because they said it was too expensive, but today House Republicans advanced a $600 billion tax cut for business.Back in February, Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have expanded veterans’ benefits, and built 27 new VA clinics and facilities over the next ten years, because they thought the bill was too expensive. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) spoke for the group of 41 GOP obstructionists when he said, “This bill creates new veterans’ programs and it’s not paid for—it’s all borrowed money.”
The veterans benefits bill would have cost $21 billion over ten years.Today, the House Ways and Means Committee advanced a bill that would give businesses a $600 billion tax cut. Democrats have been opposed to the Republican plan to add nearly $300 billion to the deficit without paying for it.
According to The Hill, “As with the research tax break, Democrats said they generally supported the incentives considered by the committee. But none of them voted for any of the tax breaks, insisting they couldn’t get on board with clearing another slate of tax breaks that would add more than $300 billion to the deficit.
In all, the dozen preferences approved by the Ways and Means panel over the last four weeks cost $600 billion over a decade.”
http://www.politicususa.com/2014/05/29/gop-hypocrites-call-vets-benefits-expensive-600-billion-tax-cut-business.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=fee d&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+politicususa%2FfJAl+%28Poli ticus+USA+%29
It's All Obama's Fault! Thanks, Obama!
Fire Shinsheki!
More off topic drivel.
off topic? underfunding, under resourced VA has been going on for decades, and esp in the last decade, Repugs ESPECIALLY, having greatly increased the VA burden with their bullshit wars, have defuned and/or refused to fund increases for VA.
off topic? :lol
SR has NOTHING to say.
How to Fix the VA
But with 9 million patients, 320,000 employees, 971 hospitals and clinics—It’s not going to be easy.
President Barack Obama had no choice but to accept Veteran Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki’s resignation. The VA inspector general’s interim report issued this week contained too many damning findings of “systemic” problems that grew under Shinseki’s watch. Key among these was the finding that the actual VA primary care wait times in Phoenix averaged 115 days—more than four times the VA’s previously reported average of 24 days. That discrepancy revealed a gap between reality and official reporting, and suggested questions about the VA’s integrity ran all the way up to the secretary’s office.
More broadly, the growing VA scandal cast doubt on the ability of the government to deliver health care, a major Obama administration priority. If the White House could not deliver on this promise to veterans, a key constituency for whom the president and vice president have frequently described health care as part of a “sacred trust,” then how could the administration be trusted to provide care for all Americans? Coming after the legal and practical challenges to the Affordable Care Act, the White House could not afford another health care failure. And so Shinseki had to go.
Unfortunately, his departure will do little to fix the broader problems in the massive VA health care system—and may even set the quasi-leaderless agency back as it waits for a new secretary to be appointed and confirmed.
Winning armies rarely learn. It takes the strategic shock of defeat to catalyze learning and change.
The VA is the second-largest cabinet agency, and the nation’s largest health care and benefits provider, with an overall fiscal 2015 budget of $165 billion (greater than the State Department, USAID, and entire intelligence community combined), including $60 billion for health care. The VA employs more than 320,000 personnel to run 151 major medical centers, 820 outpatient clinics, 300 storefront “Vet Centers,” more than 50 regional benefits offices, and scores of other facilities.
This massive system provides health care to roughly 9 million enrolled veterans, including 6 million who seek care on a regular basis.
It’s hard to overstate the challenges of leading this massive agency: The ideal candidate would probably fuse the best traits of a general like Shinseki, a politician like Bill Clinton, and a businessman like Lee Iacocca or Mitt Romney. The systemic integrity problems in the VA’s health care system, coupled with the broader resource allocation problems they were masking, will remain for the next secretary, whoever he or she is.
Here are six ways to begin to fix the VA.
1. Give the VA the resources it needs. Even with its massive $60 billion health care budget, the VA arguably lacks the funding it needs to treat all veterans . This resource shortfall is the root cause of the scheduling shenanigans in Phoenix: If the VA had what it needed, it wouldn’t have needed to play fast and loose with veterans’ appointments. A group of veterans organizations prepares its own shadow VA budget each year; this year’s budget called for approximately $7.8 billion more in VA health funding. This money would go to hiring doctors and nurses (assuming they’re available—a national doctor shortage affects the VA too), as well as building or leasing new facilities.
2. Allocate VA resources more smartly. The veteran population is undergoing tremendous demographic and geographic change. As World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and Cold War conscripts die, the veteran population is changing to reflect the all-volunteer force we have today: smaller, more dispersed, more diverse, and increasingly concentrated in urban or coastal areas. Unfortunately, this is not where VA hospitals and clinics are located.
The VA is seeing demand from both older veterans and younger veterans. The median age of the veteran population is 64, meaning that the majority of veterans are hitting retirement age and presenting themselves to the VA with service-connected conditions compounded by age. At the same time, veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan cohort are seeking VA care and benefits in record numbers. The next secretary needs congressional support to shrink or close underutilized VA facilities, build or lease new clinics (favoring outpatient clinics instead of large hospitals, following the overall direction of American health care), and move VA personnel between facilities to reflect where veterans live now, and where they need care.
3. Restructure the VA health care system. The VA divides its health system of 151 hospitals and 820 clinics into 23 regions that don’t align with any other geographic scheme within the federal government. These regions lack the leadership, staff capacity, and authority they need to oversee health care facilities. As a result, hospitals have evolved into fiefdoms unto themselves, giving rise to the expression, “If you’ve been to one VA hospital, you’ve been to one VA hospital.” This system must be broken apart and rebuilt to give the secretary the ability to implement national policy, standardize practices, and ensure quality patient care. Ideally, the VA would cut the number of regions and align them in some way with the regions used by the Department of Health and Human Services or Department of Defense TRICARE system. Within these VA health care regions, senior executives should be selected for management expertise and ability, not just for time served as a VA clinician. And regional executives should be picked by the secretary and be accountable to him or her—potentially with a requirement for Senate confirmation—not unlike the system for selection of generals and admirals, who require Senate confirmation at the very top levels.
4. Rebuild the VA’s healthcare IT system. Twenty years ago, the VA led the nation in development of electronic health records. Today, the VA has fallen behind. The VA’s antiquated systems contributed to the chaos in Phoenix where, reportedly, front-line employees used DOS-based systems to manage appointments and clinical resources. This problem is exacerbated by the VA’s balkanized system of regions, hospitals, and clinics. Many facilities have customized their software in ways that don’t mesh with other VA facilities. The next VA secretary must completely overhaul this system, much as Shinseki did for the VA’s benefits system (at great cost). The VA should consider replacing its antiquated appointments system with one that is more transparent, allowing veterans to see wait times and relative availability across the system, and make health care decisions accordingly. Such solutions exist in the private sector. The VA should embrace them. Likewise, the VA must invest in its health records system, and ideally build one that meshes with the system now being procured by the Pentagon.
5. Integrate better with the private and nonprofit sector. The VA provides exceptional medical care, particularly for service-connected issues such as prosthetics, hearing loss, and combat stress. However, more than two-thirds of veterans seek medical care from non-VA sources rather than the VA, and that’s unlikely to change. Many more veterans get care from nonprofit providers, especially for mental health issues. The VA must find ways to integrate its care with that given by the private and nonprofit sector, to provide veterans with “continuity of care” wherever they get seen. More pointedly, the VA must better leverage external resources to fill gaps and shortfalls in its care, such as in primary care and mental health care. The demographic changes within the veterans community suggest the VA is seeing its peak demand now, from young and old veterans alike. Building permanent VA infrastructure may not make as much sense as leveraging private providers, contractors, and nonprofit organizations to serve veterans (ideally knitted together by a common health records system).
6. Build a bridge across the Potomac. One of Shinseki’s greatest failures belongs also to two other revered cabinet officers, former Defense Secretaries Robert Gates and Leon Panetta. Defense and the VA failed to create an integrated health records system (or separate systems that would talk to each other), and have failed more broadly to synchronize and align the two agencies’ care for veterans, service members, and military families. The redundancies between these two agencies cost the taxpayers billions of dollars each year, and worse, create gaps for veterans to fall into, such as when claims submitted to the VA can’t be substantiated for lack of Pentagon service records. Even Shinseki, with his long Army lineage and prior service as the top Army general, failed to partner effectively with the Pentagon. The next secretary must do better, especially in a post-war era of fiscal austerity, when both agencies are likely to have fewer dollars to serve their respective populations.
There’s a lesson from military history that applies well here: Winning armies rarely learn. It takes the strategic shock of defeat to catalyze learning and change within armies. Although the VA doesn’t fight wars like its brother agency the Defense Department, it retains a military culture because of its leadership and the large number of veterans who work there. And like the Pentagon, the VA only learns or changes well under enormous external pressure, such as the kind that comes upon losing a war, or occurs during a political scandal like this one.
Notwithstanding this week’s headlines, the data overwhelmingly show the VA has done well in supporting veterans over the last decade or two. Patient satisfaction scores are high; the claims backlog is down; the VA has worked with the nonprofit community to reduce veteran homelessness by roughly 24 percent in five years. The list goes on. Nonetheless, deep problems remain within the VA that threaten its ability to succeed in the years to come. Today’s political crisis may offer the strategic shock the VA needs to address these core issues, now under a new secretary, to serve our veterans as well as they have served us.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a...va.single.html
GME Funding: How to Fix the Doctor Shortage
gehttps://www.aamc.org/linkableblob/27...c2012-data.jpg
The Issue
The number of federally funded residency training positions was capped by Congress in 1997 by the Balanced Budget Act. The 26,000 residency positions available for first year trainees will not be enough to provide training for the students graduating from medical school as early as 2016. In addition, Medicare support of graduate medical education (GME) includes paying its share of the costs of training, as well as supporting the higher costs of critical care services, such as emergency rooms and burn units, on which communities rely. Without adequate support, the ability of teaching hospitals to provide essential patient care is threatened.
The Solution
Medical schools are doing their part by expanding enrollment over the last several years. Students have responded with applications and enrollment reaching new highs. Now Congress must do its part by lifting the cap on the number of federally supported residency training positions. Lawmakers have responded with proposals in the House and Senate to increase the number of residency positions. But they must act now in order to ensure that there are enough physicians for our growing and aging population.
https://www.aamc.org/advocacy/campai...ixdocshortage/
Balanced Federal Budgets, purce VRWC/1% austerity bullshit.
as i've said, this thread has nothing to do with budgeting, yet thats all you keep spamming. feel free to start a new one regarding VA budgets
SR :lol VA cheating has NOTHING to do with VA resource and VA mgmg pressure to meet/beat the numbers :lolQuote:
Originally Posted by spurraider21
im sorry if the :cry pressure :cry was so much that they put lives in risk by cheating wait lists
boutons continual spamming and linkdumping is slowly killing this forum.Quote:
Originally Posted by spurraider21
you dickless rednecks, bubbas, tea baggers, Repugs, BigCarbon shills, libertarians, just HATE being bitch slapped by progressive, liiberal, well informed, intelligent Great Boutons.Quote:
Originally Posted by TeyshaBlue
In your dreams, simpleton. :lol boutons
i could just spam articles that nobody here will read to make it seem like my opinions are popular tooQuote:
Originally Posted by boutons_deux
your opinions suckQuote:
Originally Posted by spurraider21
my fact-filled articles that you don't read, to your deepening ignorance, are briliiant.
(SOCIALIST ALERT!)
Bernie Sanders Shows Leadership on VA As GOP Looks For Ways to Abandon Vets
Bernie Sanders reacted to Eric Shinseki’s resignation while speaking to veterans in Burlington Vermont on Friday with sadness and later in a statement posted on his website.
Secretary Shinseki is an American hero who courageously served his country in war, rose to be the Army chief of staff and has dedicated his distinguished career to helping his fellow soldiers and veterans. I am sad that he resigned.[/COLOR]
The unequivocal goal of the VA must be to provide the highest-quality health care possible to all of our veterans in a timely manner. The new leadership must transform the culture of the VA, establish accountability and punish those responsible for the reprehensible manipulation of wait times. As chairman of the Senate veterans’ committee I look forward to working with President Obama, the new VA leadership and my Senate colleagues to make that happen.[/COLOR]
In direct contrast to the Republican Party, Bernie Sanders recognized that the VA’s problems cannot be solved by playing the blame game. In February, he proposed a bill to address chronic under resourcing at the VA – a bill that Republicansblocked. Sanders recognizes that the VA does have management and administrative problems but it also needs more facilities and more healthcare providers to address the inevitability of increased demand as a country in perpetual war.Now that Republicans and the beltway punditry have their pound of flesh, Veterans deserve real solutions to the problems that have plagued the Veterans Administration for decades. Problems which have nothing to do with Eric Shinseki.
If we are going to play the blame game, then look no further than Republicans who have consistently under resourced the VA then blamed the VA for its inability to meet ever increasing demand.It’s the same game Republicans play for any and all programs they don’t like. Under resource them, blame Democrats, then pitch throwing people, in this case our vets, to unaccountable corporate wolves. It’s the same game they play when it comes to Social Security, Medicare, Medic-Aid, education and prisons.
As usual, the Republican “solution” would benefit their corporate friends and this time Veterans would pay the price.Just consider that the VA provides facilities in rural areas that the private sector ignores because, frankly, those locations aren’t profitable enough. Moreover, the VA’s facilities have specialists to provide the sort of care that veterans need, but is not available at private facilities.
As Suzanne Gordon explains:
Many injured soldiers have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan with what is known as poly-trauma — PTSD plus traumatic brain injury and limb amputations. Few primary care physicians — or even specialists — have much experience treating such cases in the private sector. In fact, without the VA, vets would have trouble getting any primary care services given the serious shortage of primary care providers in this country.[/COLOR]
Perhaps Eric Shinseki did the right thing by resigning, but giving Republicans his head and probably those of other high level officials at the VA won’t solve a thing.As a temporary measure, we should extend care beyond the VA, because our Vets need care now. They have already waited an unacceptable period of time to see a doctor, let alone get the treatment they need.It will be up to Democrats to lead by reintroducing the Vets benefits bill that Republicans blocked in February. Without question, Republicans will block it again while claiming that throwing the Vets to corporate wolves is the solution.It will also be up to us to stand by our Vets, not only by voting out the laziest lawmakers in our history, but by making their lives miserable while they continue to accept their pay checks and spend the bulk of their time meeting with corporate donors and the rest of it claiming to care about vets but doing nothing.
http://www.politicususa.com/2014/05/...iticus+USA+%29
Privatizing VA would, like privtaizing SS, Medicare, Medicaid, would be distributiting tax payer wealth to corps and their investors.
your articles are just a whole bunch of tl;dr's that don't even address my opQuote:
Originally Posted by boutons_deux
I fucked your your "blame Shinsheki" brain-dead thread with lots of facts and historical context, and put precise blame on the Repugs, so GFY.
Do you think intimidating Shinsheki into quitting, as supposedly omnipotent King of VA SOLELY responsible for VA's underfunding, accomplished anything?
Your linkdumps suck.Quote:
Originally Posted by boutons_deux
The war on terror started on September 11, 2001. Congressional leadership has had almost 13 years to build up the VA with enough staff and facilities to care for the wounded from two wars. After news broke that the VA was failing our veterans, the Senate finally began to act.
A bill was brought to the Senate floor that would allow the VA to contract with private medical facilities, enabling veterans facing long waits to get quicker treatment. The VA would also be able to use $500 million from its current budget to hire more medical staff. While I do not agree with allowing veterans to go to private medical facilities, this bill was a good start. The organization clearly needs more doctors, more nurses, more staff, more facilities. Only three senators voted against this bill. Of those three, one of them is my senator, Ron Johnson (R-WI).
Sen. Johnson said that he couldn’t support the bill because of its cost—$35 billion the first two years and $50 billion per year after that, according to a preliminary estimate by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
This is the same Sen. Johnson who said in a recent MSNBC interview that the current crisis in Iraq was caused because President Obama was not forceful enough about keeping troops in the country when the war ended. I am sure he would have found the money for that. I wonder if Senator Johnson would whine about the costs of the VA if just one of his three children had spent a year or more in some godforsaken hellhole like Afghanistan or Iraq.
Sen. Johnson married into money and has never worked a day in his life. The only constituents he cares about are the ones who agree with him. He does not and can not understand what our veterans are going through. Veterans need the specialized care the VA provides. The average family practitioner is just not able to deal with a double amputee with PTSD because it's just not something he or she was trained to do. Of course Sen. Johnson just wants to privatize veteran's care and make it a for-profit industry. To him, it isn't about caring for veterans—it's about making a buck for his wealthy donors.
Sen. Johnson is an embarrassment to Wisconsin and to our nation. Veterans deserve the best possible care we can give them. They earned it. It should never come down to cost; these young men and women gave up their youth, gave up their innocence, to serve our country. In many cases, they have given far more than we can ever repay. If our nation could find $4 to $6 trillion dollars to pay for two wars, we sure as hell better come up with the money to care for those wounded in those wars. They earned it, and we owe them.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/0...A?detail=email
Just one of many Repug assholes who screw the vets, but will support spending $Ts for Other People's Kids to risk maiming of mind and body, and death.