Word: va
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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According to Richard Robinson, benefits-services director of the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association, Winsick's special status as an ex-POW obligates the VA to get him the treatment he needs by contracting with a private provider if necessary. "We run into this type of wrongful, dollar-driven disallowance all the time," says Robinson. "They're trying to cut corners. The name of the game is to try to save money and to hell with the veteran...
Access to free health care from the VA Department, once available to all honorably discharged veterans, has since 1986 been restricted, for the most part, to low-income veterans and those with service-connected disabilities, categories that include 10 million of the nation's 28.5 million veterans. Almost 3 million individual veterans utilized VA care in fiscal 1994. Now Congress's budget bill projects flat spending of $16.2 billion annually for VA medical programs through the year 2002, with no provision for inflation or mandated salary increases or an influx of patients owing to reductions in Medicare and Medicaid...
Paradoxically, the VA, notorious as a pork pipeline and bastion of bloated bureaucracy, is at the same time starving for resources. Its medical-programs budget has been declining in real dollars for 16 years. Some congressional mandates restrict access and ration care in often misconceived efforts to keep costs down, while others keep federal dollars flowing to unneeded facilities in Congressmen's districts, driving costs up. Long-forgotten political horse trades, now enshrined in law, make it difficult for the VA to deploy its resources rationally to best meet the real needs of veterans...
...million World War II veterans enter their years of peak medical need--their median age is 73--the VA may be decreasingly able to serve them. "If you lock us into the 1995 spending levels for the next seven years, you make some assumptions almost as though there's nobody out there to treat," says Jesse Brown, Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs. "A lot of people are behaving as though our veterans are already dead...
Eight and a half million veterans are 65 or older. Twenty-five thousand of them suffer from paralyzing spinal-cord injuries or diseases, and in many cases, their spouses are growing too frail to care for them at home. Six hundred thousand veterans, by VA estimate, will be suffering from Alzheimer's and other severely dementing conditions by the year 2000. Yet the VA and state veterans homes today can provide fewer than 40,000 nursing-home beds. "The demand for long-term care is going to skyrocket over the next five to 15 years," observes VA Under Secretary...