The ACA is the VA Way!

The real cost of healthcare will not really hit until after the mid-term elections, and quite possibly not until the People are fooled once again into believing the Democrats will fix everything once they have another socialist in the White House and return the House to a socialist majority. Don't expect the Republicans to do any better.

The latest in a long list of scandals, the problems with the Veterans Administration is no surprise to millions of veterans and their families.
J.D. Gordon, a retired Navy Commander who served as a spokesman with the Pentagon in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 2005-09 and a senior adviser to several Washington-based 'think tanks' reported on Fox News last week that Al Qaeda prisoners have better health care than America veterans.


According to the post at Fox News Opinion:


"Despite the fact that Al Qaeda terrorists carried out the Sept. 11 terror attacks, killing 3,000 people in America, the admitted co-conspirators and their roughly 150 fellow jihadists at Gitmo have approximately 100 doctors, nurses and health care personnel assigned to them.
Doctors and medical personnel are at their beck and call. Got a cold, a fever, a toothache, a tumor, chest or back pain, mental health issues, PTSD? No problem, come right on in. Military doctors are waiting to see you.

The VA and Gitmo eligible patient-to-health care provider ratios speak volumes.

While the Gitmo ratio is 1.5 to 1, for America’s 9 million veterans receiving VA health care and 267,930 VA employees, the ratio is 35 to 1."

I know from my own personal experience of the VA. My father was a disabled veteran of World War II and served in the Army Air Corps. His injuries would take over a decade to begin to manifest themselves, just as he was told by the excellent Army and Navy surgeons that treated him at Walter Reed Army Hospital. In 1958, he was admitted to the VA Hospital, in Philadelphia, where a decortication was performed to remove most of his left lung, which had calcified over the years and was pushing his heart toward the center of his chest.

His care at that time was excellent. But things did change over the years. After returning from a fishing trip, Dad collapsed and was taken by Emergency Medical Team transport to the local hospital and then transferred to VA for emergency surgery to remove his gall bladder. That incident happened in the early 1980's. I accompanied him on several visits for follow up care and noticed that things were getting sloppy. Missing physician's prescriptions for patient medications, and then a home delivery of medications via US Postal Service or United Parcel Service. But the waiting times are what I noticed had changed. Maybe it was due to an increase in the number of veterans requiring medical care, a decade or so after Vietnam.

Things got really bad by the 90's when my father was waiting for weeks to see a doctor. Several times the VA 'lost' his appointment request. Dad's passing took my focus off of VA since I was no longer dealing with them. But I do have friends today who have had similar experiences and say that it is getting worse not better.

According to a report issued by the Inspector General there were violations regarding human subjects used in research programs in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Executive Summary found the following:

"We substantiated the allegations of human subjects protection violations in the areas of informed consent and adverse event reporting. We found that researchers obtained Human Immunodeficiency Virus tests on subjects without their consent; could not provide informed consent documents for all subjects enrolled in the protocols; and did not appropriately obtain witness signatures for demented patients enrolled in research protocols. We further found that researchers did not report deaths occurring during the course of the protocol, although these deaths were most likely not related to the research."

Then we have reports from Albuquerque, New Mexico about more 'secret waiting lists' in an article at the Daily Beast:
"Add Albuquerque, New Mexico to the growing list of VA hospitals accused of keeping secret waiting lists to hide delays for veterans seeking medical care. And it may already be too late to get to the truth and find out what harm, if any, was done to veterans there—VA officials are already destroying records to cover their tracks, a whistle-blower inside the hospital tells The Daily Beast.

Last month, word broke that the Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Phoenix kept a secret waiting list that allegedly led to dozens of preventable deaths. The VA’s inspector general was brought in to investigate the charges and hasn't yet found any deaths in Phoenix linked to wait times, but his investigation is ongoing. Since then five other facilities have come under fire, leading to calls for VA Secretary Eric Shinseki to step down. And now there’s Albuquerque’s. The evidence for this new secret list may be hard to track down, however.

“The ‘secret wait list’ for patient appointments is being either moved or was destroyed after what happened in Phoenix,” according to a doctor who works at the Albuquerque VA hospital and spoke exclusively with The Daily Beast. “Right now,” the doctor said, “there is an eight-month waiting list for patients to get ultrasounds of their hearts. Some patients have died before they got their studies. It is unknown why they died, some for cardiac reasons, some for other reasons.”"

Then we have another report out of Florida:

"Three mental health administrators at the Malcom Randall VA Medical Center in Gainesville have been placed on administrative leave after U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs officials found a “secret” waiting list of more than 200 patients, a local union president said Thursday. …

News recently surfaced of alleged secret waiting lists and falsified records at VA hospitals around the country, including reports of allegations that some veterans on such a list at the Veterans Affairs Health Care system in Phoenix had died while waiting for appointments. Reports have said the secret waiting lists were meant to hide delays and could have been used so management executives could get bonuses related to shorter wait times.

Muriel Newman, union president for the local chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees, told The Sun that the VA administration had placed chief psychiatrist Dr. Rajiv Tandon, administrative officer Karen Chin and Peter Durand, the chief of the mental health service call line, on administrative leave after the discovery of the list at the Gainesville VA hospital.

Wisnieski confirmed those three employees have been placed on paid administrative leave while a review is conducted into the list and the circumstances surrounding it."

Based on all definitions, the Veterans Health Benefits Administration is a single-payer system. That is relevant when you consider that Obamacare is going to head in that direction after the next presidential election. The reasons are many but the bottom line is that no private insurance carriers will be capable of paying claims on the amounts of premiums that they can charge. 

According to the Weekly Standard:

"Robert Laszewski—a prominent consultant to health insurance companies—recently wrote in a remarkably candid blog post that, while Obamacare is almost certain to cause insurance costs to skyrocket even higher than it already has, “insurers won’t be losing a lot of sleep over it.”  How can this be?  Because insurance companies won’t bear the cost of their own losses—at least not more than about a quarter of them.  The other three-quarters will be borne by American taxpayers.

For some reason, President Obama hasn't talked about this particular feature of his signature legislation.  Indeed, it’s bad enough that Obamacare is projected by the Congressional Budget Office to funnel $1,071,000,000,000.00 (that’s $1.071 trillion) over the next decade (2014 to 2023) from American taxpayers, through Washington, to health insurance companies.  It’s even worse that Obamacare is trying to coerce Americans into buying those same insurers’ product (although there are escape routes).  It’s almost unbelievable that it will also subsidize those same insurers’ losses."

However, it should be remembered that insurers subsidies terminate in 2016, placing the entire burden on the American Taxpayer.

The bureaucracy of the (not so) Affordable Care Act will eat up so much of the budget, there will be little to do except ration care and borrow more Federal Reserve Promissory Notes. Although the White House and both Houses of Congress will not suffer along with the rest of the nation, as they are the board members of the UNITED STATES INC. and their salaries and benefits are immune to the problems they caused  for all the other American People.

It has to be that way in a closed loop system with no fresh revenue coming in without higher premiums or subsidies. Subsidies in the form of Congress passing spending bills that will be financed by borrowing, which of course will have to be paid back. And where will those funds come from?

While the foregoing is terrible, the true purpose of the secret waiting lists was to remove patients from the active waiting list in order to reduce the number of patients waiting, in order to qualify for incentive bonuses, which increases the total amount paid by the American Taxpayer

Reference Links:

http://www.va.gov/oig/54/reports/VAOIG-07-03042-182.pdf

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/18/exclusive-v-a-scandal-hits-new-hospital.html

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/05/16/seventh-va-office-finds-secret-wait-list-with-over-200-veterans-on-it/

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/bailing-out-health-insurers-and-helping-obamacare_774167.html

IRS Money Laundering? You Bet!

While doing due diligence as I research articles, documents, letters, memos, and other reference material, I occasionally run across other authors, express themselves in a manner that I cannot ignore.

Kevin E. Lake is such an author. I present to the Esteemed Readers of this blog, Mr. Lake's article which is based on his own experiences with the "Infernal Revenue Service" as they break the law and steal disability benefits from veterans. Well, let's just allow Mr. Lake to tell the story!

Kevin E Lake is an author and an Iraq War Veteran. His most recent novel, “Off Switch” was written to raise awareness of the suicide epidemic in the U.S. among our soldiers and veterans.


"The IRS has mastered the art of breaking their own laws, one case in particular; using banks to launder and then steal disabled veterans’ disability checks.

The Veterans Disability Act of 2010 is a Federal law which exempts VA disability from withholding of any sort. Actually, existing code USC, Title 38, §5301 already protected VA disability from withholding, but this provision was re-iterated and included in the newer legislation of 2010, because too many civil court judges were legislating from the bench and including veterans’ disability monies as earned income and granting it to ex-spouses (men and women) in divorce proceedings, at times, leaving disabled veterans without any safety net for self-care.

However, the IRS is still figuring out ways to get to a veteran’s disability money. How do I know? Recently, it happened to me.

A couple of months ago, when I logged into my online bank account to make sure that my VA disability check had been deposited (I am a 60% disabled veteran of the Iraq War) I saw red and a negative balance, beside which read the word “hold.”

I called my bank and was informed that the IRS had sent a letter demanding that the bank take all of the available funds out of my account on the first day of the month and then wire them to them. The bank gave me a telephone number at which to call the IRS. After being placed on hold for a very long time- long as in a biblical age- I finally spoke with an agent.

Long story short; they claim I made $157,000 in 2010 and that I owe them tons of money, and that until I pay it, a lien will remain on my personal bank account.

At the beginning of 2010, I was still in the hospital recovering from injuries I’d sustained while serving in Iraq. I was released early in the year, but still did not find employment until October, and even then, it was only part time. I can assure you, as I did the IRS, that I did not earn $157,000.00. Actually, I earned less than $10,000.00 in 2010.

I kindly read the federal code mentioned above to the lady I spoke with at the IRS, reminding her that VA disability money is 100% exempt. She placed me on hold for another age (I could see a man coming- bearing water- over the horizon) and then she came back on the line and told me, “We do not take veterans’ disability money. We wait until the funds are deposited from the VA and then we take all of the funds from your bank account.”

Um.

Isn't this called laundering?

I find it ironic, now, that only weeks before the IRS put this hold on my bank account, I’d been asked to be a contributing writer for key Tea Party personality “Joe the Plumber.” I’d been writing freelance articles on veterans affairs for some time, publishing and distributing them mostly through Facebook, and I viewed the personal call Joe made to me as one of the greatest compliments I’d been paid in regard to those articles. I jumped at the opportunity to join his team and give my work, such as this piece, a wider audience. I can’t help but think that part of my decision to join Joe’s team may have played a part in being singled out by the IRS at this specific time and having my VA disability money taken from me in complete breach of federal law.

The good news is that through my persistence, and my refusal to accept their answer, that it is okay to launder VA disability money, I was able to get the IRS to refund all of the money they’d taken from my bank. I am working with the IRS to remedy their great misunderstanding of my earnings for 2010, and I am reaching out to all disabled veterans to let them know that if this is happening to them, they do have rights, and they need to stand up for them.

As many veterans know, our war does not stop once we make it home. Often, new battles begin, such as battles for the rights our government promised they’d provide for us upon our return from war that they often turn around and attempt to take away.

Currently in America, twenty two veterans a day are committing suicide. One of the biggest contributors to the suicide epidemic is our veterans’ inability to find suitable work after serving and the inability to take care of themselves and their families financially. This is why VA disability is sacred- except in the eyes of the IRS. Too many disabled veterans in the U.S. are just a disability check away from being on the street and joining the already nearly 70,000 homeless veterans in America.


If you are a veteran receiving disability from the VA, and you are having it garnished, withheld, or having a lien placed upon it for any reason, please contact the entity who is withholding, garnishing, or who has placed the lien, and reference the federal code stated earlier in this article. You stood up for the rights of all people of a great nation in combat, but unfortunately, you must continue to stand up for yourselves to ensure that the promises of being taken care of upon your return are kept. But you can do it, because you are a warrior, and that’s what warriors do."

Reprinted with permission of the author. Thank you for your service!

Reference: http://www.americasfreedomfighters.com/2014/05/20/shock-irs-caught-laundering-veterans-disability-checks/

A Voice From The Past: General Smedley Butler Speaks Outstandingly

By 1933 corporate America was firmly established in the UNITED STATES of America, corporate ideology had already begun to supplant the ideals of free market commerce and trade (capitalism). This should be keep in mind as you read General Butler's comments regarding corporate racketeering.
"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents." 

Semper Fidelis