Word: va
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...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...
...VA's medical system, which claims a backlog of $870 million in unmet needs for equipment and $800 million in deferred maintenance and repairs, will lay off 5,000 to 10,000 employees next year, and not all of them will be bureaucrats. As it is, the care-giving staff is stretched so thin on some wards that quadriplegics complain of spending days in bed for lack of anyone to help them up. Gerald Barba, 39, a peacetime Navy veteran who broke his neck in a swimming accident, praises the dedication of the staff at the VA Hospital...
...charge that Congress has balanced the budget on the backs of veterans "just plain mean, disgraceful." He argues that a declining veteran population, coupled with streamlined management and reform of the arcane eligibility rules that keep veterans' hospitals from delivering care in the most efficient way, should enable the VA to maintain its level of service. "Without a balanced federal budget," he adds, "rising interest payments on the national debt would soon crowd out our ability to continue providing for the nation's veterans...
Veterans' advocates and the VA itself agree that relief from congressionally mandated rules that tilt the system toward expensive in-patient care could squeeze far more bang from the buck. (Under the present system, for example, many veterans cannot receive treatment for hypertension as outpatients. They have to wait to be admitted as in-patients for a heart attack or stroke.) But while the House has passed eligibility reform, the Senate...