Veterans Affairs

People think of the VA as mostly an immense integrated medical system, but it also administers numerous non-medical benefit programs and has a cemetery department as well. As has been widely reported lately in relation to the new nominee to be VA Secretary, VA budget is $273 billion, although a billion or so of that is actually the cost of disability benefits and other direct payments. Still, $170 billion is a chunk of change, and it supports some 378,000 people.I can tell you from personal experience that the VA has labyrinthine bureaucracy, in part unavoidably because they need to have a very high level of security concern and congress has given them intricate legal obligations. There have been a lot of reports about long waits for care and other problems with the adequacy and quality of services. This is not, however, because most VA employees aren ' t trying to do their best for veterans. It ' s because George Bush II started two big wars and some smaller ones that he pretended weren ' t going to cost anything or actually hurt anybody. Instead we wound up with 8,000 military personnel killed in action and more than 50,000 wounded, plus hundreds of thousands more with non-combat injuries and psychological trauma, and 2.6 million post-911 veterans. (The VA has officially diagnosed more than 200,000 post-911 veterans with PTSD.) Bush didn ' t ask for any money to take care of them, on the assumption that they wouldn ' t exist, so the VA is still trying to catch up.So fixing ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs