I'll start this with the obligatory source quote. Note that the bolding's all mine.
Several lawmakers at an initial meeting of House and Senate negotiators said the estimate improperly assumed that about 8 million eligible veterans not yet enrolled in the system would seek VA care, nearly doubling its patient population.
"Is the CBO product that they've produced reflective of anything sane?" asked Senator Richard Burr, the top Republican on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee.
"This is ludicrous. This is impossible for us even to start an intelligent discussion on what we put in legislation when we've got numbers that are just so grossly out of line," he said.
So who is Senator Richard Burr, the whining-loudest-today Republican of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee?
Wikipedia says: "Richard Mauze Burr (born November 30, 1955) is the senior United States Senator from North Carolina and has served since 2005. A member of the Republican Party, Burr previously represented North Carolina's 5th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives from 1995 to 2005."
Not that John Edwards was a peach, you understand, but at least Edwards was a Democrat.
Burr's a preacher's kid and a lawn equipment salesman -- a Kappa Sigma member, as anti-choice and pro-gun as it gets. He's joined by Alabama's Jeff Sessions in his fiscal-responsibility objections to expanding VA care to meet demand across the nation.
Back in '09 President Obama named a pretty good manager to head the VA a few years ago. A guy named Shinseki.
A guy whose troops in the field thought he did a good job.
A guy who had firsthand knowledge of war from out at the sharp end of it, unlike Donald Rumsfeld and a who's who of Gee O Pee (including Richard Burr) notables: "entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, where he earned a B.A. in engineering and a second lieutenant’s commission in 1965. Later that year, he began the first of two combat tours in Vietnam. He was awarded three Bronze Stars for valour and a Purple Heart with an Oak Leaf Cluster—he received the latter honour for a combat injury that cost him part of his right foot. He spent almost a year recovering from his wounds, but he returned to active duty in 1971."
A guy who understood some things Richard Burr clearly does not. A guy who resigned a few weeks ago. His resignation didn't fix many of the problems -- but it did take away the media scrutiny on those problems, and let guys like Richard Burr turn right around and scream that taking care of the veterans coming home from the ill-advised US military incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan costs too much.
Finding someone — anyone — to blame is the preferred act of misdirection, with that person’s firing or resignation usually sufficient to create a false impression that the problem has been solved. So it has proved with the May 30 resignation of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki. Practically overnight, the press stopped treating the VA’s shortcomings as an intolerable disgrace and reverted to its usual stance, which is to view them as a tedious bore.
As The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists' author Hugh Gusterson notes:
Congress put the VA in an impossible situation by not providing the resources the agency needed to handle the massive influx of veterans wounded in the wars Congress had voted to authorize. Between 2011 and 2014 demand for VA medical appointments increased 50 percent, while it was only given resources for a 9 percent increase in hiring of doctors. Each doctor was supposed to care for no more than 1,200 patients, but the average VA doctor had 2,000.
Meanwhile, at the same time that the VA struggled to deal with an onslaught of 650,000 soldiers injured in Iraq and Afghanistan, its facilities were already staggering under the escalating demands of Vietnam veterans. As the Harvard health economist Linda Bilmes points out, veterans’ health care needs typically peak 30 to 40 years after a war ends; the demands of Vietnam veterans were just reaching their peak as an influx of new veterans with amputations, traumatic brain injuries and PTSD stretched resources to the breaking point.
The problem was not one of leadership or integrity, then, but of simple arithmetic.
Richard Burr thinks the fix is to cut funding for the VA's needs some more.
Jeff Sessions apparently thinks the fix is privatization.
His Army reserve service in the 70s notwithstanding,
Sessions was one of only three senators to vote against additional funding for the VA medical system. He opposed the bill due to cost concerns and indicated that Congress should instead focus on “reforms and solutions that improve the quality of service and the effectiveness that is delivered.”[25]
Richard Burr never put on so much as a JROTC T-shirt. His "support" of the troops and the veterans they turn into once the shooting stops ... is deserving of no respect at all.
Where do these learned gentlemen of the Senate want to take us? Why, back before the ACA, of course: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/... ... by way of "fiscal responsibility" such as that advocated by think tanks dedicated to ... what?
“That spending would proceed automatically without any further action by Congress or oversight from the Appropriations Committee,” according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget analysis.
“The ‘emergency’ designation is for sudden, unforeseen, and temporary needs – none of which define this situation – not a tool for politicians who are unwilling to pay the bills,” said CRFB president Maya MacGuineas in a statement. “Washington is once again looking for the easy way out.”
- See more at: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/...