Borrowed ideas from veterans program during congressional bid
-Obama 2008: VA will be ‘leader of health care reform
-Former Pentagon Spokesman: Gitmo Detainees Get Better Health Care Than Veterans
May 23, 2014 Aaron Klein
Obama delivering his concession speech after losing to Bobby Rush in 2000
Even when he was campaigning for Congress in 2000, President Obama unveiled a sweeping health-care plan that modeled aspects of the Veterans Administration’s medical system.
As WND reported, eight years later, during his transition into the White House, he proposed in his “Obama-Biden” plan to “make the VA a leader of national health care reform so that veterans get the best care possible.”
In his 2000 congressional campaign, Obama proposed health-care legislation on the federal and state level to lower the costs of prescription drugs for seniors. His plan called for the government to buy the medication in bulk and resell it to seniors at lower prices.
On Jan. 20, 2000, the Chicago Defender reported Obama’s prescription drug plan was modeled after a similar program run by the VA. The Veterans Health Care Act in 1994 calls for drug companies to give a 24 percent discount to the VA.
Obama ultimately lost his congressional bid to four-term incumbent Bobby Rush.
His 2000 and 2008 plans are not the only indications he was familiar with the VA medical system early in his career.
Earlier this week, WND reported documentation and testimony reveals that in 2005, Obama, as a U.S. senator, was briefed on dangerously long wait times for returning veterans to receive health treatment.
Obama was a member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. On numerous occasions he publicly chastised President George W. Bush about the wait times, treatment shortages and lack of funding to the Veterans Administration’s medical programs.
On June 28, 2005, for example, Obama complained at a hearing on the VA medical care budget that “somehow it seems that we’re willing to trot in front of flags and take photographs with soldiers, but when it comes to the appropriations process, we’re not there.”
Obama said he heard from veterans of a problem with receiving treatment.
“One final question that I’ve got, specific to some of the issues that I’m hearing back in Illinois,” he told the Senate. “I’ve heard some constituents complaining that veterans’ clinics have been reducing hours. Is there any association – if that’s the case, is that one strategy to handle the shortfall? Are we reducing hours as a way of handling the shortfall?”
He stated: “The bottom line is: Are veterans being impacted in terms of their health care? I would be deeply disturbed if it turns out that as a consequence of this, what you say is managing this budget shortfall, turns out to be simply scrimping on the care that we’re providing our veterans. So I’d like a specific answer to that.”
Prior to the Senate hearing, in January 2005, the Chicago Sun-Times reported Obama held an emotional meeting with 500 veterans packed into a Chicago hall. The veterans complained about the way the VA was treating them, including waiting for treatment.
In June 2005, Obama and other senators, including Democrats Harry Reid and Dianne Feinstein, wrote a letter to Bush demanding his administration provide for the health-care needs of America’s veterans.
The senators wrote that they foresaw a coming crisis.
“As of January 2005, over 1 million U.S. troops have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 3 and one half years. The Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) annual mid-year budget review confirmed that many of these soldiers have returned home and are beginning to access the VA health care system in record numbers, placing increased demands on an already overburdened agency. Many of us saw a looming crisis and sought to take steps that would avert it.”
The letter of complaint continued: “With the recent announcement that the VA is facing a shortfall of approximately $1 billion in fiscal year 2005 it seems that our concerns are well founded. Unfortunately, the VA’s current shortfall, and larger shortfalls predicted for future years, has confirmed that your Administration has not prudently addressed the budget impacts of these conflicts.”
In August 2005, Obama released a statement again alluding to problems with wait lists.
He asserted the “VA should never be funded as an afterthought” and wrote of disabled veterans waiting “hundreds of days” to have their claims processed.
“We warned the administration that there may be a shortfall, and so we shouldn’t have to be scraping for change now to care for our veterans,” Obama said. “It should be America’s first priority. And yet, we’ve all seen how we keep falling short.”
Obama said disabled veterans “are waiting hundreds of days just to get their claim processed.”
“Wounded veterans in Illinois receive less in disability benefits than those in New Mexico or Maine,” he said.
The latest information comes amid a brewing scandal over when Obama was made aware of the VA shortages, alleged secret waitlists and reports of offering inaccurate waiting times and scheduling failures.
The waitlists kept wounded veterans lingering and may have contributed to as many as 40 veteran deaths in Phoenix alone.
Tuesday, the Washington Times reported the Obama-Biden transition team was briefed in 2008 on a data integrity issue within the VA.
“This is not only a data integrity issue in which [Veterans Health Administration] reports unreliable performance data; it affects quality of care by delaying – and potentially denying – deserving veterans timely care,” wrote VA officials in a briefing obtained by the Times.
Asked about the scandal, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney indicated Obama first learned of it in press reports.
A CNN reporter asked Carney when Obama was made aware of the issue.
The White House spokesman replied: “You mean the specific allegations that I think were reported first by your news network out of Phoenix, I believe?”
Carney continued: “We learned about them through the reports. I will double check if that is not the case. But that is when we learned about them, and that is when I understand Secretary Shinseki learned about them, and he immediately took the action that he has taken.”
With research by Brenda J. Elliott
http://www.wnd.com/2014/05/flashback-obama-modeled-early-health-care-plan-after-va/
—-
Obama 2008: VA will be ‘leader of health care reform
N.Y. Times columnist cited ‘huge success story’ of ‘socialized medicine’
May 22, 2014 by Garth Kant
WASHINGTON — It’s one of those promises the president would probably like to forget.
In vowing to make the Veterans Administration the model of national health-care reform back in 2008, the outlook for scandal-plagued Obamacare suddenly seems even worse.
WND has discovered that during his transition into the White House in 2008-09, President Obama proposed in his “Obama-Biden” plan to “make the VA a leader of national health care reform so that veterans get the best care possible.”
However, instead of fixing the VA, the administration has had to defend its role in the death of veterans by neglect.
Meanwhile, WND is reporting that eight years earlier, in a failed run for Congress, Obama unveiled a sweeping health-care plan that modeled aspects of the Veterans Administration’s medical system.
The VA problems became a national sensation April 14 when CNN reported that at least 40 U.S. veterans died waiting for appointments at the Phoenix VA, many of whom were placed on a secret waiting list.
The discovery of the Obama-Biden VA plan fits a pattern that has come to light this week in which Obama repeatedly warned, or was warned, of serious problems at the VA but apparently did little in response.
In the document labeled the Obama-Biden Plan from the Office of the President Elect, Obama makes a series of promises to veterans, including:
– Fix the Benefits Bureaucracy: Hire additional claims workers, and improve training and accountability so that VA benefit decisions are rated fairly and consistently. Transform the paper benefit claims process to an electronic one to reduce errors and improve timeliness.
-Strengthen VA Care: Make the VA a leader of national health care reform so that veterans get the best care possible. Improve care for polytrauma vision impairment, prosthetics, spinal cord injury, aging, and women’s health.
-Fully Fund VA Medical Care: Fully fund the VA so it has all the resources it needs to serve the veterans who need it, when they need it. Establish a world-class VA Planning Division to avoid future budget shortfalls.
The Obama-Biden plan seems to have fallen so far short of its promise to “Fix the Benefits Bureaucracy” that the VA itself has admitted 23 vets have died waiting for care, and investigations of possible death-by-neglect have spread to 26 VA facilities around the country.
As WND has reported, Obama was warned about severe problems at the VA repeatedly over the years, even before he became president.
- WND discovered that Obama was briefed on problems at the VA as far back as 2005, when he was a senator and a member of the Veterans Affairs committee.
-In a 2007 speech, Sen. Obama said, “Keeping faith with those who serve must always be a core American value and a cornerstone of American patriotism. Because America’s commitment to its servicemen and women begins at enlistment, and it must never end.”
– The Washington Times reported Monday that the Obama administration received notice more than five years ago that VA medical facilities were reporting inaccurate waiting times and experiencing scheduling failures that threatened to deny veterans timely health care.
– VA officials reportedly warned the Obama-Biden transition team in the weeks after the 2008 presidential election that the wait times the facilities were reporting were not trustworthy.
-More recently, House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller, R-Fla., wrote a letter to Obama on May 21, 2013, that warned: “an alarming pattern of serious and significant patient care issues at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Centers (VAMCs) across the country … (including) failures, deceptions, and lack of accountability permeating VA’s healthcare system … I believe your direct involvement and leadership is required.”
-And, WND reported last week that Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., reminded VA Secretary Eric Shinseki that Congress had been informed two years ago that gaming the system at the VA was so widespread, employees would look to get around regulations as soon as the rules were implemented.
Democrats have been quick to say the problems were caused by an increase in veterans in the system due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that the solution is to increase spending on the VA.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said, “If the VA does not have enough doctors to see these patients, then these problems are a result of a lack of funding.”
On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” NBC News chief Pentagon reporter Jim Miklaszewski claimed, “You have a VA that is overwhelmed and under-resourced,” adding, “There’s just not enough money right now in the federal government to fix it.”
However, John Merline at Investor’s Business Daily crunched the numbers and found that just wasn’t true.
On the contrary, he found the VA’s budget has been exploding, even as the number of veterans steadily declines.
VA spending nearly tripled from 2000 to 2013, while the population of veterans declined by 4.3 million.
Even more telling, wounded warriors coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan are not increasing treatment costs.
Those vets are actually far cheaper to treat than aging vets.
A Congressional Budget Office report found that they cost $4,800, on average, in 2010 compared with $8,800 for other veterans who used the system.
It also found, while these Iraq and Afghan vets account for 7 percent of those treated, they were responsible for only 4 percent of its health costs.
Iraq and Afghan vets, the report found, “are typically younger and healthier than the average VHA patient and as a result are less expensive to treat.”
Still, the VA scandal keeps exploding, with no signs of slowing down. VA Secretary Shinseki had testified before the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee last week that he was not aware of problems similar to those in Phoenix at other VA facilities, except in isolated cases. But emboldened whistleblowers have now identified 26 VA facilities around the country experiencing similar problems.
Just Thursday, an attorney claimed her client died of neglect by the Seattle Veterans Affairs hospital.
The attorney said Donald Douglass had a small spot on his forehead confirmed as cancerous when he went to the Seattle VA hospital in 2011, but it was four months before the hospital scheduled an appointment for him to have it removed — and by then, it had spread, wrapping around a facial nerve and eventually getting into his blood.
According to attorney Jessica Holman, “Had he had his surgery timely, he’d be alive today.”
In Miami, a criminal investigator for the VA police department in South Florida went to a local television station because, he said, the VA told him to stop investigating drug deals on hospital grounds.
“People are dying,” Detective Thomas Fiore said, “and there are so many things that are going on there that people need to know about.”
Fiore claimed illegal drug deals area occur daily at the hospital, involving, “Anything from your standard prescription drugs like OxyContin, Vicodin, Percocet, and of course marijuana, cocaine, heroin, I’ve come across them all.”
He says he was even stopped from investigating reports of missing drugs from the VA pharmacy by the official in charge.
“I was instructed that I was to stop conducting investigations pertaining to controlled substance discrepancies,” by the hospital’s chief of staff, Dr. Vincent DeGennaro, said Fiore.
The growing scandal could affect upcoming elections, because if the VA problems offer a preview of government-run health insurance, then Republicans may be rapidly acquiring explosive new ammunition in their efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare.
Former AP Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier, now with National Journal, said Obama’s poor handling of the mismanagement at the Department of Veterans Affairs could plague his presidency as an all-time low point.
“The president has known the VA has been a mess for a long time, and hasn’t done anything to get it fixed,” he said. “It’s gotten worse recently — at least for the last two years, we’ve known we’ve had these problems and nothing’s been done,” said Fournier.
However, leading liberals have long touted the VA as an efficient model of government-run health care.
New York times columnist Paul Krugman called the VA a “huge success story” in 2011, saying “[I]t’s free from the perverse incentives created when doctors and hospitals profit from expensive tests and procedures, whether or not those procedures actually make medical sense.”
Krugman added, “Yes, this is ‘socialized medicine’ … But it works, and suggests what it will take to solve the troubles of US health care more broadly.”
In 2009, his fellow New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, wrote, “Take the hospital system run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the largest integrated health system in the United States. It is fully government run, much more ‘socialized medicine’ than is Canadian health care with its private doctors and hospitals. And the system for veterans is by all accounts one of the best-performing and most-cost-effective elements in the American medical establishment.”
Follow Garth Kant on Twitter @DCgarth
http://www.wnd.com/2014/05/obama-2008-va-will-become-a-leader-of-health-care-reform/
—-
Former Pentagon Spokesman: Gitmo Detainees Get Better Health Care Than Veterans
23 May 2014 by Frances Martel
Former Pentagon Spokesman J.D. Gordon has seen the facilities at Guantánamo Bay and can attest personally to the fact that the al Qaeda operatives being detained at the naval base received better and faster care than veterans in the United States waiting for health care from the federal Veterans Affairs office.
Gordon writes at Fox News today that the health care provider to patient ratio is better for terrorists detained at Guantánamo than it is for veterans, that veterans have to wait longer for care and receive worse quality care. “The admitted co-conspirators [of the September 11 attacks] and their roughly 150 fellow jihadists at Gitmo have approximately 100 doctors, nurses and health care personnel assigned to them,” Gordon notes, while the VA’s patient care program offers veterans a 35-to-1 ratio of patient to provider.
Care–both physical and mental–for Gitmo detainees is easily accessible for anyone wishing to see a medical professional at the detention facility. Gordon cites a military fact sheet detailing the amenities for terrorists being held at Guantánamo, which notes that doctors provide 66,000 medications per year and 14,000 sick call visits. Detainees also receive dental care and “age-appropriate colon cancer screenings.”
Meanwhile, the Obama administration is facing a major scandal, as reports surface that the VA falsified information to make it appear that veterans were waiting less time for routine check-ups than they had been. The accusations led to Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki testifying before the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs and widespread calls for Shinseki to resign. Shinseki has stated that he does not have any intentions of resigning over the scandal yet and that the VA under his administration has done “good things.”
The widespread delays in medical care for veterans are believed to have complicated thousands of medical issues for veterans and even led to suicides among those waiting months for a medical appointments. Gordon explains in his column that he believes the VA scandal is one of gross mismanagement and misplaced priorities, using the vast expenses at Guantánamo as an example. Other VA offices have similar stories of mismanagement; in Chicago, for example, the salaries for painters were three times higher than those for quality assurance personnel.
President Obama said that he will “not tolerate” any mismanagement of the VA office, “period,” in a statement this week. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney added this week that the president “has confidence in Secretary Shinseki.”
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2014/05/23/Former-Pentagon-Spokesman-Gitmo-Detainees-Get-Better-Health-Care-than-Veterans
—
Related previous posts on this blog
http://reclaimourrepublic.wordpress.com/2014/05/22/video-va-whistleblower-exposes-drug-dealing-theft-abuse-older-veterans-should-be-shot-in-the-head/
http://reclaimourrepublic.wordpress.com/2014/05/23/video-va-scandal-evidence-of-big-govts-failures-future-of-obamacare-if-dems-not-voted-out-obama-knew-in-08/
http://reclaimourrepublic.wordpress.com/2014/05/22/video-va-whistleblower-exposes-drug-dealing-theft-abuse-older-veterans-should-be-shot-in-the-head/
http://reclaimourrepublic.wordpress.com/2014/05/03/va-whistleblower-secret-waiting-list-hasnt-been-shredded/
http://reclaimourrepublic.wordpress.com/2014/01/25/leave-no-veteran-behind-vas-proposed-application-rules-shortchange-disabled-vets/
http://reclaimourrepublic.wordpress.com/2014/04/20/vile-ny-times-op-ed-tries-to-link-white-supremacists-to-veterans/
http://reclaimourrepublic.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/72-types-of-americans-considered-potential-terrorists-in-official-govt-documents/
Tagged: abortion, al-Qaida, “Muslim Mafia, benghazi, Chemical Weapons, Christian, collapse of America, Constitution, dictator, foreclosure, Hamas, immigration, IRS, Islam, Islamist, Israel, jihad, Muslim Brotherhood, Nazi, NSA, Obama, obamacare, radical Islam, rights, Second Amendment, Syria, Tea Party, Tyrannical Government, voter fraud, White House