Trump's Abject Failure Towards Veterans

Republicans always talk about "supporting the troops" and "honoring veterans" with talk being the operative word.  Republican talk and actions never coincide with the objective reality experienced by veterans and under the Trump/Pence regime the situation has grown far worse.  Many veterans find themselves waiting on benefits payments and facing eviction for non-payment of rent.  And then there is the issue of waiting to receive medical benefits - something my son-in-law can cite chapter and verse on.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the growing scandal surrounding the VA and the plight of veterans.  When Trump says he honors and supports veterans, like so much that comes out of his mouth, it's a lie.  Here are article highlights:

Donald Trump did not go to Arlington Cemetery on Veterans Day. He was “extremely busy,” he told reporters in a press call on Friday. But his conscience does not appear to trouble him. During a recent visit to the Marine barracks in Washington, he even congratulated himself for his commitment to veterans. “The fact is I’ve done a lot,“ he said. But as is often the case, reality does not exactly comport with Trump’s version of events. [Trump] The president hasn’t accomplished much for veterans, as a burgeoning scandal within the Department of Veterans Affairs demonstrates.

The VA owes GI bill payments to thousands of veterans, NBC News reported on Thursday. Some have waited months for their benefits, which cover living expenses in addition to tuition bills, and the VA has admitted that it has received several complaints from veterans who now face eviction because they haven’t been able to pay rent. VA officials have blamed the backlog on the department’s IT system. Though NBC has reported delays in payments since August, a Thursday hearing conducted by the U.S. House Committee on Veteran Affairs underscored the new extent of the crisis.

[V]eterans continue to struggle. “I can’t afford rent. I can’t afford groceries. It’s a lot of emotional strain and aggravation,” Daniel Gorman, an Iraq War veteran and Fordham University student, told the Washington Post on Thursday. “I’m supposed to graduate in May 2019, but I don’t know if that’s feasible if this persists.”

The flaws of the VA’s IT system predate the Trump administration. But as CNN reported on Thursday, the Forever GI bill Trump signed in 2017 may have exacerbated certain long-standing technology issues. “The legislation did not address the VA’s antiquated IT system used to account for those changes, and the department’s failure to implement changes to that system has resulted in a cascading series of errors affecting the distribution of housing allowances to veteran students,” CNN wrote. Congress provided $30 million for the VA to resolve its IT problems, but the Post reported that the department is six months late on a status update. Meanwhile, the department has over 45,000 unfilled job vacancies, no permanent information chief, and VA Secretary Robert Wilkie said in early November that he is planning unspecified budget cuts, at Trump’s request.

So though Trump doesn’t bear sole responsibility for the GI bill crisis, the issue illustrates the wide chasm between Trump’s professed affection for veterans, and the way veterans experience his preferred policies. Trump’s federal hiring freeze, which he temporarily instated not long after taking office, affected many veterans who relied on the federal government as a pathway to work. [Trump] The president has also repeatedly expressed interest in privatizing more of the VA’s functions, something most major veterans’ service organizations oppose.

Other Trumpian scandals threaten the department’s reputation, as well as its ability to fulfill its responsibilities to veterans. ProPublica reported in August that three Trump cronies — Palm Beach, Florida physician Bruce Moskowitz, Marvel Entertainment CEO Ike Perlmutter, and attorney Marc Sherman — wielded unprecedented influence over VA policy, though all three lack experience serving in either political office or in the U.S. military. The three are perceived by critics to favor the privatization of certain VA benefits, occasionally in ways that benefit their own business interests.

Public-private partnerships don’t always work out for veterans who are enrolled in the VA. Passed in 2014, the Veterans Choice Program, which allowed veterans burdened either by geographic distance from a VA facility, or by long waits for VA appointments, to seek alternative private care, should have reduced wait times. Efficiency was the program’s raison d’etre. But in June 2018, the Government Accountability Office concluded that the Choice program didn’t quite work as advertised. “The Choice program was aimed at reducing wait times through increased access to private health care, but the GAO’s performance audit conducted from April 2016 through May 2018 found that, in many cases, veterans would have been better off making appointments at VA facilities,” reported Military.com.

According to a November 13 story from Stars and Stripes, a separate GAO report found that private contractors hired to examine veterans who file disability claims often failed to meet basic standards for timeliness and accuracy. “Most contractors fell into the ‘unsatisfactory performance’ category, meaning 10 percent or more of their reports contained errors. The worst-performing contractor had errors in 38 percent of their exam reports,” Stars and Stripes reported.

As the GI bill crisis mushrooms and thousands of jobs go unfilled, the prospect of progress looks faint.

Upon first, superficial glance, Trump’s approach to the VA may look like hypocrisy. After all, he’s repeatedly claimed to love the troops. But hypocrisy is too simplistic a frame. Of course Trump says he loves the troops; try finding a politician in national office who’d say otherwise. And yes, [Trump] the president has failed to demonstrably improve conditions for veterans enrolled in the VA. But hypocrisy didn’t produce that outcome; instead, it was an inevitability, created by Trump’s commitment to small government.

Trump may not bear sole responsibility for the GI bill crisis, but his VA is in especially poor shape to remedy the problem. As a result, he’s inadvertently revealed the full consequences of a war on welfare. America may elevate veterans — may even bestow on them benefits she denies to civilians who have never taken up arms — but her benevolence is bounded by her more capitalist commitments. In the end, veterans are just citizens, subject to the same incompetencies and cruelties we all endure.

Many Veterans Would Suffer Under Trumpcare

With the 4th of July tomorrow, there will be many Congressional Republicans out and about glad handing constituents at 4th of July celebrations and bloviating about how they "support our troops - even when they don't in fact.  Some will go even further and loudly claim support for America's military veterans even though they are poised to actively harm thousands of veterans if Trumpcare is signed into law.  I have touched on this topic before, but it bears repeating and many in the military and many veterans need to have a wake up call that will have them aware of the danger and just maybe convince them to stop reflexively voting Republican.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the looming harm that many veterans could well fall victim to thanks to their duplicitous Republican "friends" in Congress.  Here are highlights:

As Republicans strive mightily — and perversely — for a health-care system that would increase the uninsured by 22 million people, they should ponder the impact on a particularly deserving group — veterans.

It’s not unexpected that heartless GOP plans would be hard on the vulnerable, but do they realize that includes many who continue to suffer from their service?

These are people largely supportive of Republicans . . Republicans [claim to] honor veterans, but you can’t tell it by their current health-care proposals.

The GOP plans do not directly affect the Veterans Affairs Department’s extensive system of health services. About 7 million vets, however, get their care outside of VA services. After the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, kicked in, the number of vets without insurance dropped by almost 40 percent, according to Sen. Jon Tester (Mont.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, and other committee members.  Republicans would reverse that trend. 

Tester and his Democratic colleagues said the Senate bill could:

·        Result in nearly 1.75 million disabled and low-income veterans losing Medicaid coverage
·        Impose a tax on 600,000 veterans, forcing them to pay up to five times more for health insurance
·            Cause more than 5 million veterans difficulty in finding services at rural hospitals
·        Generate increased mental health-care fees for the many veterans who suffer post-traumatic stress from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam
·        Result in up to 7 million veterans losing tax credits to help pay for medical care
·        Cause about 7 percent of veterans to lose access to care for opioid or other substance abuse problems.

In five recent polls, the approval ratings for the Republican health-care plan ranged from a miserable 16 percent to a pitiful 30 percent, sometimes with a significant percentage undecided.

“This plan, written in secret, will devastate thousands of elderly, disabled and rural veterans who go outside of the VA for all or some of their health care,” Tester said. . . . . He was joined in outrage by Democratic Sens. Patty Murray (Wash.), Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), Joe Manchin III (W. Va.), and Sherrod Brown (Ohio).

“Our country makes a promise to take care of the men and women who serve, but Trumpcare would do just the opposite,” Murray said.

Added Blumenthal: “Every Member of Congress who plans to support this bill needs to imagine looking a veteran in the eye and telling them why their mental-health care for PTS (post-traumatic stress) has been halted, or why they can no longer afford treatment for traumatic brain injury sustained while serving their country.”

Again, the moral bankruptcy of today's Republican Party is nearly complete.