The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

Obama's Issues

President Barack Obama is being asked to deal with several issues at the same time lately. Actually, these issues have been there for a long time and just haven't been dealt with effectively.

One such issue is the Veterans Administration and its handling of health care for veterans. President Obama knew about this in his first presidential campaign, and promised to fix the problem. Instead, nothing has been done and the situation has gotten worse during his Administration.

That's bad enough on its own. But the whole country should be concerned about what it means for everyone under the horribly mis-named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.

Part of the problem is that Obamacare does nothing in the field of health care. It is an insurance bill, not a health care bill. It does not create a single additional doctor or nurse or dentist or other health care provider. But its demands will demand more of those still working in the medical care system.

And that's before you add in all the people coming across the border. You know, the ones the Department of Homeland Security is busing (and flying) to relocation centers all over the country, those who are given a court date and released, etc. They're all going to need free lawyers, we're told, and free health care.

That's also before you add in the fact that the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) isn't stable — it isn't finished. It's still being changed, both by the Department of Health and Human Services (formerly Kathleen Sebelius) and the White House (Barack Obama).

Of course, a lot of folks insist the President and his Cabinet departments don't have that kind of authority. They aren't allowed to change the laws passed by Congress and signed by the President, either by adding provisions to those laws or by declining to enforce those laws. If they do, it comes to this.

There also seem to be other differences in views between those inside the Administration cocoon and those outside it. Some of those differences are rather substantial.

Just one more. And this one may be a little snarky. But it gave me a chuckle, so here it is anyway.

The VA Scandal

You have to laugh. If you don't, you'll cry.

Not only is the VA hospital delaying treatment to our veterans (the average wait time in Phoenix was 115 days, compared to the VA's 14 day requirement), they're now destroying evidence of what they have done. And now we find that some veterans have lain in morgues, unburied, for perhaps 18 months without being buried — whether with or without the honors to which they are entitled.

But it's not just Phoenix. Last I saw, at least 26 VA hospitals are being investigated. It appears at least a number of these were using the same subterfuge to game the VA system. While it is possible these schemes were independently "invented", it is much more likely that these incredibly immoral activities were orchestrated from above — somewhere higher in the Veterans Administration heirarchy.

Here in New Mexico, the VA hospital masked some of its deficiencies by assigning sick veterans to doctors who don't work there. And when they were challenged, their response was like that given to

Retired Air Force lieutenant colonel Renee Sussman. She recounted a telephone conversation with a VA pathologist after a two-month delay in which she was told to “call the president” to take up her problems with the system before being hung up on.

How have the Obama Administration and its allies responded? Senator Bernie Sanders, the self-described socialist and chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, said "People die every day." Eric Holder's Department of Justice has no plans to investigate, causing White House correspondent Jake Tapper to inquire "How many dead veterans do you need?". Meanwhile, the House of Representatives has passed a dozen VA reform bills, all of which have been blocked by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (probably on instructions from the White House of President Barack Obama). The result is that Al Qaeda terrorists being held at Guantanamo get better health care than our veterans.

President Obama's personal response? He says he's "mad as hell" over the VA scandal, which he says he learned about through newspaper reports in recent weeks. But that's not believable.

Barack Obama was briefed on the issues of the Veterans Administration before his inauguration — before he was president — and since. If he really didn't know about these problems, it was a matter of willful ignorance.

Something more is needed. Yes, some of the VA's issues are problems of long standing. But those problems have worsened in the past five years under President Barack Obama. The House Republicans have at least been proposing possible reform actions. But their counterparts in the Senate and the Executive haven't been listening — haven't been talking — haven't been engaged. Saying they're "mad as hell" has been their only response.

It's not enough.