The VA was the Judas Goat used to sell national healthcare O Care to many of the sheep human livestock masses who said “look at how Bush II’s VA treated veterans”.

Well, that was Bush II and they had a war to motivate people to fight the bureaucracy over bad care. Or perhaps they just ignored it as usual, the media 5th column.

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Very true.
I used to wonder sometimes why God would periodically bring down desolation and destruction (or allow it to happen) on different groups (including his own followers), but now that I have seen what is happening in the US and elsewhere, I begin to understand.

Sometimes you do have to burn it down and start over.

So deep that I really fear for the continued existence of our democratic Republic.

More and more, as the poison has spread, it’s looking like decadent Rome, when it changed from being a Republic into an Empire/dictatorship, and this decadence is seeping into every nook and cranny of our country. Slower to take hold in middle America, but it’s seeping in nonetheless.

Look at the resistance Trump is getting just trying to make the changes he’s promised–it’s total war against him, his appointees, and his policies by not only the Democrats, the MSM, Hollywood, many Unions, Academics, the East and West coast elites, and major cities that are run by Democrats, but also by most of the Republicans who are supposedly his natural allies, basically by everyone who is not a resident of middle America or who voted for him..

The Civil Service just has too many people who have some interest in seeing it continue to exist, and exist, in pretty much the same form it is in now–Federal workers, Members of Congress, and Unions to name just a few of the interested parties.

I suspect that, against this magnitude of opposition, Trump will only be able to do a couple of major things during his term, and that he has to be very careful about which major things he picks to do out of a list containing many possible choices, and a complete reform of the Civil Service may not be one of them.

Does anyone really think that a VA serious about patient care as their number one priority, would spend even a million or two on such crap, when the money could be so much better used for patient care?

They’re just corrupt, and couldn’t care less about their patients, they only care about themselves, and the survival of the organization.

During the ebola episode, my state took a portion of an just-mothballed hospital and converted a portion into an infectious disease facility. The new facility was just down the road in the health center complex and they had not made a decision what to do with the old place.

My younger daughter, a 4th generation doc, has worked as a resident in another academically-associated VA in another state, similarly nominally supervised. Nothing has changed. Zip, nada, nothing. It is more disgusting than is commonly known. Vets are killed by neglect or negligence daily.

Make it hard to fire a bureaucrat and you are asking for even more inefficiency and featherbedding, ala Snow on Pine’s experience.

One little known truth about the VA is that they were only supposed to treat service connected injuries and illnesses. However, many vets who find themselves without insurance and with no where else to turn have been treated by the VA. Cigarette smoking related diseases (a large category) were deigned to be service related, as the military used to pass out free cigarettes and sell them very cheaply on bases. Agent Orange related illnesses (also a large category) allowed many Vietnam veterans access to the VA. PTSD is another medical condition that has allowed many vets who have no wounds or other illnesses that are service connected to access the VA. So, the VA is serving a lot of veterans that it wasn’t originally set up for. They do try to refuse treatment to those who are ineligible, but it hasn’t worked out well as public opinion is for treating vets and few realize that many who are getting treatment didn’t strictly meet the eligibility requirements.

Just qualifying for treatment by the VA can be an arduous process. My older brother was finally treated for cigarette smoking related condition of COPD even though he had no other service related conditions. It took him months to get in. Once he was accepted he got good treatment from the VA hospital at Palo Alto, CA. He probably lived three more years than he would have without treatment.

Career (20+ years of service) military vets like myself have Tricare For Life (TFL) which is somewhat analogous to Medicare and after age sixty five becomes a backup to Medicare. This is where career veterans get their medical care. Thus far it has worked quite well for me.

Back then, several decades ago, as an experienced medic, I was not impressed by the quality of the doctors they had on staff.

Moreover, as a medic, I well remembered the VA patients who were transferred into our military hospital to be “rehabilitated” when they were suffering from major bedsores–an indication of poor basic medical care i.e. patients confined to their beds were not rotated so that the same area of skin did not receive all the pressure for hours or days at a time, leading to bed sores.

I can still remember, as well, these grown men begging us not to send them back to the VA hospital they came from, and crying, when it was time for us to ship them back to VA care.

It seems as if things haven’t changed a bit.

From all of the horror stories I’ve read, the culture within the VA seems thoroughly corrupt, and adamantly resistant to change. Thus, I don’t think that the VA, as constituted, can be “fixed.”

I know it’s not possible, but it would be better to dismantle this agency, and to rebuild it from the ground up

Or, to abolish the VA altogether, and just give veterans vouchers to use at any civilian medical facilities, hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, and any specialists that they wanted to use.