Krugman des Tages
Valor and Squalor, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times:
When Salon, the online magazine, reported on mistreatment of veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center two years ago, officials simply denied that there were any problems.
...
For all its cries of “support the troops,” the Bush administration has treated veterans’ medical care the same way it treats everything else: nickel-and-diming the needy, protecting the incompetent and privatizing everything it can.
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And the Walter Reed scandal is another Hurricane Katrina: the moment when the administration’s misgovernment became obvious to everyone.
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The problem starts with money. ... The quagmire in Iraq has vastly increased the demands on the Veterans Administration, yet since 2001 federal outlays for veterans’ medical care have actually lagged behind overall national health spending.
To save money, the administration has been charging veterans for many formerly free services. ... More important, the administration has broken longstanding promises of lifetime health care to those who defend our nation.
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So when you hear stories of veterans who spend months or years fighting to get the care they deserve, trying to prove that their injuries are service-related, remember...: all this red tape was created not by the inherent inefficiency of government..., but by the Bush administration’s penny-pinching.
But money is only part of the problem.
We know ... that one of the factors degrading FEMA’s effectiveness was the Bush administration’s relentless push to ... privatize disaster management, which demoralized ... and drove away many of the agency’s most experienced professionals. It appears that the same thing has been happening to veterans’ care.
parmenides - 5. März, 06:50
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