When the most recent VA atrocity, the “waiting-list” scandal, broke last year, His Earness’s party designed a solution to the problem in which nineteen veterans of America’s wars had died waiting months for an appointment at a VA clinic or hospital.
The new $10 billion Choice program was supposed to let veterans avoid waiting lists by choosing private doctors at VA expense—those docs, anyhow, who are willing to put up with the delayed payments and costly paperwork of the federal bureaucracy. Many docs have long shunned Medicare and for the same reason now are trying to avoid Obamacare.
I got my Choice card in the mail a few months ago, one of 8.6 million sent out since November. Having private insurance, I didn’t need it and not wishing to take the slot of some other veteran who did, I didn’t return the form to activate it. I threw away the card. Which was just as well because I seemed not to qualify, anyhow, not living at least 40 miles from a VA clinic. As usual our corrupt political class and their news media cronies trumpet their solutions while hiding the fine print.
Apparently it wouldn’t have mattered if I had lived at least 40 miles from a clinic: “A recent Veterans of Foreign Wars survey on the Veterans Choice Program found that ’80 percent of the 1,068 survey participants who reported that they either lived 40 miles from a VA medical facility or could not be seen by VA within 30 days said they were not afforded the choice to receive non-VA care.'”
Now Wormtongue appears to be backing off the Choice program entirely, by moving some of the allocated $10 billion to help shore up the VA system. Which figures. The VA health system has long been an unfulfilled promise to many veterans, one further stressed in the past two decades by forcing career-military retirees to use it.
As an old Infantry OCS pal of mine, who worked for the VA after the war, told me: When applying for anything from the VA you should treat the multitude of requested form submissions as a hobby. With luck you’ll eventually get somewhere. Maybe.
It’s good for some. Mrs. Charm’s Navy career retiree father refused to go anywhere else for treatment of his lung cancer. My Air Force retiree father wouldn’t have stepped foot in it on a bet. Pity that pols have always preferred lying to telling the truth and that Mr. Hope & Change is just another member of the mendacious pack.
Via WSJ.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 