It is a fact that George Bush and the House of Representatives has cut federal funding for VA hospitals. This is not an issue for debate. It is a fact.
The following is a first person account. You can read the entire story by going to the link below.
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The House of Representatives has recently voted on the 2004 budget which will cut funding for veteran's health care and benefit programs by nearly $25 billion over the next ten years. It narrowly passed by a vote of 215 to 212, and came just a day after Congress passed a resolution to "Support Our Troops."
The Veteran's Administration, plagued by recent budget cuts, has had to resort to charging new veterans entering into its system a yearly fee of $250 in order for them to receive treatment. It is a sad irony that the very people being sent to fight the war are going to have to pay to treat the effects of it.
According to the Veteran's Administration, 28 million veterans are currently using VA benefits. Another 70 million Americans are potential candidates for such programs. This amounts to a quarter of the country's population. Veterans and their families will sadly begin finding that they have no place to turn for their medical treatment as V.A. hospitals across the country face closing their doors. With the budget shrinking, staff will be let go. This could mean the loss of over 19,000 nurses. Without these nurses, this leads to the loss of over 6.6 million outpatient visits. Approximately one out of every two veterans could lose their only source of medical care. That is, if they even realize help is available to them. The Bush Administration recently ordered V.A. medical centers to stop publicizing available benefits to veterans seeking assistance. This follows discontinued enrollments of some eligible veterans for healthcare benefits as of January, 2003.
Bush Administration funding cuts will also prevent veterans from receiving their disability pensions.
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If there are any vets out that have a personal experience with this, feel free to corroborate this statment. This is a stupid request on my part because I'm sure that somebody out there will falsely claim to be a vet just so they can say I'm full of shit. Maybe my new name should be Shitfixer? I'm sure that would make many of you happy.
-- Modified on 8/26/2006 10:28:42 PM
why does it take a Vet to respond?
Personal experiences will be all over the board. It's a government bureaucracy for God sakes!
Anyway, in response to your 2004 accusations...
from factcheck.org in 2004...
"Funding for Veterans up 27%, But Democrats Call It A Cut. Money for Veterans goes up faster under Bush than under Clinton"
http://www.factcheck.org/article144.html
-- Modified on 8/27/2006 11:54:16 AM
Thank you for giving me another source to support what I was saying.
Funding up 27%? Yeah it's up because more vets are being injurded. Funding for veterans is going up twice as fast under Bush as it did under Clinton. And the number of veterans getting health benefits is going up 25% under Bush's budgets.
Like I said, more is being spent in total because of the number of soldiers being injured. More injuries and more soldiers being injured, the amount spent goes up. Also, your source says "THE NUMBER OF VETS getting benefits is going up 25%."
Of course the number of vets getting benefits is going up. More of them are getting injured and maimed in an unjustified an immoral war. These statistics you cite are meaningless. What is relevant and meaningful is that the AMOUNT OF MONEY SPENT PER VETERAN IS GOING DOWN.
You should learn to make sense of statistics rather than Just blind acceptance to the bullshit being fed to us by a corrupt and immoral admiinstration. It's just more smoke and mirrors to cloud the issue and to pull the wool over everyone's eyes so we don't notice that we are being fucked in the ass again.
Personal experiences will NOT be all over the board. I bet that there will be a disproportionate number of vets who will report major problems in receiving financial benefits and proper health care.
The demographics are far more complicated than you portray. I'm no expert on the subject, but just looking through the VA site's database from the 2000 census of veterans....
There were about 26 million veterans. About 20% were solely from the WWII era. Their percentage had to be much higher in the 1990's since they are dropping like flys nowdays (my father included). They are all going to be dead shortly. They come from an era when the size of the military was 10 million compared to 1 to 2 million today. And their casualty rate was much higher than in Iraq (where there are only 130,000 in country). Even just a few years ago the military was double its size today. I don't see how Iraq (or today's veterans) can be such a HUGE burden to the system, nor how the total veteran load is getting higher.
has nothing to do whatsoever with how individual disabled vets are treated.
I do not think that veterans benefits are anywhere near great enough to pay back or make up for the tremendous loss and sacrifice these young Americans have so profoundly made in their service (Jacko included). I have stated several times, right here, that it is their sacrifices that truly breathe life and power into the freedoms we all share and all too often take for granted. I would love to see veteran’s benefits increased. But that was not your argument.
You were trying to portray the Bush administration as some evil anti Vet entity, the likes of which had not been seen since Ronald Reagan snuck out of the Whitehouse at night to steal the soupbeans from the plates of the homeless.
Sure the Veteran’s treatment has sucked. It’s always sucked. But I don’t see any evidence that Bush is treating it much differently than his predecessors. There is actually some evidence to the contrary, with the exception of some of the "means" testing that began in 2003. I don't agree with it completely. My analysis was simply a different and macro view of the total load on the system and how the aging of the veteran population has been and will continue to lessen the Veteran’s draw on that system.
-- Modified on 8/28/2006 6:10:20 PM
fuck those whining vets who all they want is that we give and give. It should be an honor to have served such a great country as the U.S.A. What more do they want? And thank God those WWII vets are finally dying off. They have sponged off of my taxes long enough.
I too would like to hear of any experiences that veterans have had with the VA system.
For a period in the early '90's, I worked in the Research Service of the VA system. At that time, the Research Service was dedicated to developing therapies for diseases and injuries that affected both serving personnel and vets. Many vet health issues are separate from the general population, such as post traumatic shock disorder and tropical diseases. Indeed, the VA system took an early lead into AIDS research.
My understanding is that funding for the VA system has gotten progressively worse, beginning with George H.W. Bush and Clinton, and now picking up speed under George W. As confirmed in the article cited by scriptfixer, the George W. administration is in the process of closing down many more VA hospitals (already the Wadsworth VA in Westwood Los Angeles has closed).
Of course, closing hospitals and services is a well-known method for limiting health care expenditures. Even if some federal regulation says that you're entitled, that doesn't mean anything if there are no facilities/staff to provide services.
Consistent with such shabby treatment of the troops and veterans is the recent column by Joseph L. Galloway of the McClatchy News Service.
As indicated by scriptfixer, however, it would be much better to hear from any vets who have used the VA system for health care.
-- Modified on 8/27/2006 10:38:41 AM