re: #3 Dark_Falcon

The VA reform bill just cleared the Senate 93-3 after passing the House unanimously. It’s got to go through Conference, but that seems smooth sailing. So veterans’ care is getting extra funding.

That will fix things for sure.

The Veterans Administration scandal is pretty dreadful, but it should not be a surprise. There have been VA scandals since there was a VA - indeed, before, when there was something called the Veterans Bureau that devolved into a morass of corruption. It was replaced in 1930 by the current VA.

Two years later, veterans marched on Washington to get war bonuses they were promised during World War I. The vets had to be driven away from the capital by federal troops, a sad case of soldiers turning against soldiers. Everyone was embarrassed and reforms were promised.

And so it went - 1947, a government investigation uncovered fraud, waste and long wait times for services. Pledges are made that heads would roll. Eight years later, another investigation uncovered many instances of inadequate care, along with the requisite waste and corruption.

In the 1970s, the VA denied for the longest time that Agent Orange had anything to do with health problems. Also in the ’70s: Another investigation found inadequate patient care in the Denver and New Orleans hospitals. In the 1980s, three scandals. All of them revolved around waste, corruption and inadequate patient care.

….

Our debt to the soldiers is still real. It’s the deal we made when we hired them to do our fighting for us. Can anything win out over bureaucratic indifference and incompetence? History suggests no. That’s shameful.

Heck, Revolutionary War soldiers were denied payments they had been promised

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