The under the radar assault on the VA
By no means unexpected but bad nonetheless.
Under the Trump administration, wait times for mental health care at the Department of Veterans Affairs have increased while morale among employees has plummeted with the loss of 40,000 people, Senate Democrats said in a new report released (Jan 22).
Actions taken by President Donald Trump, VA Secretary Doug Collins and the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, in the past year have affected services and research at the VA, harmed workers and delayed care and benefits to veterans, said Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, ranking Democrat on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee…
Collins has maintained that VA services have not been affected and health care jobs have been preserved. According to the report, however, the VA has lost roughly 1,000 physicians, 3,000 registered nurses, 700 social workers and 1,500 schedulers. In addition, the Veterans Benefits Administration has lost 1,500 claims examiners.
(Military Times)
I used “under the radar” in the title of this because when I did Google searches using several different parameters, and scrolled through the first five pages of them, I found almost no recent coverage of this in the major dailies, broadcast news, or cable news. There’s no doubt that this issue, and plenty of similar ones, are being largely ignored by them on purpose.
Privatizing the VA, and pretty much everything else including public education and Social Security, so that the right-wing greedheads can strip-mine them for profit and the political power that that buys, remains a priority for a lot of really awful people. The only thing that will bring an end to the privatization push is bringing down the right-wing billionaires via regulation, taxation, and, where warranted (as it clearly very often is) criminal prosecution. As Sen. Bernie Sanders and plenty of others have noted, there shouldn’t be any billionaires. People don’t “earn” that kind of money; they steal it in a rigged, broken, grossly exploitative system. Changing that will require a legitimately progressive presidency and Congress.
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