Joel Pett for June 28, 2014

  1. Badass uncle sam
    hawgowar  over 9 years ago

    No, fewer veterans is not the answer. I retired in 1987, recalled for Desert Storm and re-retired after. Believe it or not, things were actually worse in the late 80s than they are now, but the media would not report it. Longer waits for appointments then, fewer specialists, lousy equipment. Under Bush 43 after 9/11 there was a massive influx of cash which improved thugs for a while until the flush wore off and things went back to normal. VA employees returned to their surly selves (not all, mind you, but about half) and the VA began thinking up excuses for not treating you for nonlethal conditions so they could improve their numbers and get bonuses. Then it moved on to denying treatment without really denying it (invisible waiting lists are but the tip of the iceberg) to get more and bigger bonuses. Any nurse of Dr who told tales out of school was severely punished or fired. Since the VA uses a TON of foreign doctors, they would do almost anything to be allowed to stay in practice in the VA until they had fulfilled their residency requirements. The neurologist at my local VA, for example, had to have his nurse with him at all times as she spoke Mandarin and his English was so bad that if she was not there to translate, he could not see patients. And the same VA had a scandal back in the 90s of doctors falsifying their specialty certifications and the VA not checking them, so you had non-certified doctors treating specialty patients and doing a poor job of it. At another VA I had to go to for treatment, they didn’t have enough VA doctors to cover the evening and weekend shifts so they “borrowed” foreign doctors on internships to the Ohio State University school of medicine to cover the wards o evenings and weekends. These doctors had never seen you before and would never see you again as the next evening or weekend they’d bring in another load by bus and turn them loose, unsupervised, on the veterans in the VA hospitals.

    The VA had been quite rotten for quite some time. Making fewer veterans will not solve the problem. As a government agency they are inefficient, wasteful, uncaring (institutionally speaking), and incompetent. The system is rife with corruption, fraud and abuse, as we have seen. It would be better to simply give each veteran a medical card like welfare people get and let the civilian medical industry take care of them. That way you don’t have to drive 50 or more miles to be seen by a Dr or PA or go over 150 miles round trip (and i some cases, one way) to the nearest VA hospital which actually performs surgery.

     •  Reply
  2. And you wonder why
    Kylop  over 9 years ago

    But Joel, if you would just listen to the NeoCons and embrace the idea of bombing everywhere that is not us there will clearly be need to rebuild all over the world and we will be greeted as liberators. We have to bomb everyone so that they will love us.

     •  Reply
  3. Kw eyecon 20190702 091103 r
    Kip W  over 9 years ago

    The GOP loves wounded veterans. They made so many of them, and if you just let them, they’ll make a lot more!

     •  Reply
  4. Missing large
    ARodney  over 9 years ago

    You’re making a straw man argument. The issue of who created wars is irrelevant to the fact that when asked to pay for their health care, the GOP is the only party that filibusters funding bills to void the promises that we made.

     •  Reply
  5. Badass uncle sam
    hawgowar  over 9 years ago

    Eisenhower kept us out of Vietnam. Kennedy got us in and Johnson made it big. Nixon got us out. The Spanish American War was a war of aggression and to expand territory by the US. The US invaded Russia at Archangel (Arkhangelsk) and Vladivostok during the Russian Civil War. To date no Russian forces have ever invaded the USA (ignore Hollywood). The War of 1812 was a war of aggression, aiming for territory and using the impressment of seamen as an excuse. The various Indian wars were also wars of expansion and aggression.We “bought” Alaska form the Russians but never bothered to ask the native Aleuts living there is they wanted to be bought and sold. America has a hairy hind end on many fights we’ve picked. We basically embargoed the Japanese into declaring war on us in 1941. We can thank FDR for that one. As for WWI, who attacked us? Were there German Imperial Navy ships bombarding our shores? Did we have defense treaties with England or Austria or Europe in general? The Lusitania was running arms and was the excuse Wilson needed. Wilson also passed the sedition act which infringed upon free speech in America and is still used today for that same purpose. I fought America’s wars, but I am no war monger. No soldier really is. It is WE who have to place our bodies between our nation and war’s desolation. Politicians who start wars sit fat, dumb and happy in Washington and let us bleed for their wealthy reelection supporters. Democrats are the worst of a bad lot.

     •  Reply
Sign in to comment

More From Joel Pett