Almost A Third Of Veterans On The 847,000-Long Waitlist Have Died Without VA Care

A new leaked document from the Department of Veterans Affairs indicates 238,657 veterans have died while waiting for health care appointments.

There are a total of 847,822 veterans on the enrollment waitlist, meaning a third have been declared deceased while in line for care, The Huffington Post reports.

Nevertheless, the problem isn’t quite as bad as it first seems. The VA has no method of removing applicants from the list, and so the death toll is spread out over a much longer period of time, as noted by the Analysis of Death Services report.

Moreover, according to VA spokeswoman Walinda West, many applicants never even finished the application, but because of the way the system is designed, they still remain on the list. In other words, since the VA is incapable of keeping its records clean and up to date, it’s difficult to ascertain exactly how many veterans have died over the past year while on the waiting list. The list has been maintained since 1985, West said, so data on the deaths could extend back for decades.

Whistleblower Scott Davis, who works as a program specialist at the VA Health Eligibility Center in Atlanta, argued West was wrong on all counts. First, incomplete applications are not actually counted in the pending list. Second, the list only goes back to 1998, since that’s the date the enrollment process became a requirement.

“VA wants you to believe, by virtue of people being able to get health care elsewhere, it’s not a big deal,” Davis told The Huffington Post. “But VA is turning away tens of thousands of veterans eligible for health care,” he said. “VA is making it cumbersome, and then saying, ‘See? They didn’t want it anyway.'”

Aside from evidence of abysmal record-keeping and wait times at the VA, what’s worse is that 34,000 of the veterans on the list, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, shouldn’t even be there. In a letter to GOP Sen. Johnny Isakson, Davis noted that combat veterans are owed five years of health care eligibility.

In the past, Davis has faced harassment and retaliation for sending information about wait times to the media. Back in 2014, after he appeared on “Fox and Friends,” Davis said he received a notice from his supervisors asking him not to talk in public again about VA issues.

Via: Daily Caller

Continue Reading....

Getting Back on The Right Path

“As an individual you incarnate American ideals at many levels. As the final responsible authority, in any hour of great challenge, we depend on you.”

 — William F. Buckley Jr., to President Reagan, 1985

“Let us be sure that those who come after will say of us in our time, that in our time we did everything that could be done. We finished the race; we kept them free; we kept the faith.”

 — Ronald Reagan, 1984 State of the Union address

You could not then — or now — buy the kind of coverage Time magazine gave Ronald Reagan in midsummer 1986. The cover featured a portrait of Reagan with the question, “Why Is This Man So Popular?” Inside, beneath the headline “Yankee Doodle Magic,” Lance Morrow wrote:

Ronald Reagan has found the American sweet spot. The white ball sails into the sparkling air in a high parabola and vanishes over the fence, again. The 75-year-old man is hitting home runs. Winning a lopsided vote on a tax-reform plan that others had airily dismissed. Turning Congress around on the contras. Preparing to stand with a revitalized Miss Liberty on the Fourth of July. He grins his boyish grin and bobs his head in the way he has and trots around the bases.

Via: NRO
Continue Reading.... 

RONALD REAGAN’S 1985 THANKSGIVING ADDRESS

Below is the text, followed by the video, of President Ronald Reagan’s Thanksgiving Address from 1985:

Good morning, everyone. You know, the Statue of Liberty and this wonderful holiday called Thanksgiving go together naturally because although as Americans we have many things for which to be thankful, none is more important than our liberty. Liberty: that quality of government, that brightness of mind and spirit for which the Pilgrim Fathers braved the seas and Americans for two centuries have laid down their lives.

Today, while religion is suppressed in perhaps one third of the world, we Americans are free to worship the Almighty as we choose. While entire nations must endure the yoke of tyranny, we are free to speak our minds, to enjoy an unfettered and vigorous press, and to make government abide by the limits we deem just. While millions live behind walls, we remain free to travel throughout the land to share this precious day with those we love most deeply – the members of our families. 

My fellow Americans, let us keep this Thanksgiving Day sacred. Let us thank God for the bounty and goodness of our nation. And as a measure of our gratitude, let us rededicate ourselves to the preservation of this: the land of the free and the home of the brave.

From the Reagan family to your family: happy Thanksgiving and God bless you all.

Via: Tea Party News Network

Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is executive at company that built Obamacare website

First Lady Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is a top executive at the company that earned the contract to build the failed Obamacare website.

Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. arm of a Canadian company.

Townes-Whitley and her Princeton classmate Michelle Obama are both members of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni.

Toni Townes ’85 is a onetime policy analyst with the General Accounting Office and previously served in the Peace Corps in Gabon, West Africa. Her decision to return to work, as an African-American woman, after six years of raising kids was applauded by a Princeton alumni publication in 1998

George Schindler, the president for U.S. and Canada of the Canadian-based CGI Group, CGI Federal’s parent company, became an Obama 2012 campaign donor after his company gained the Obamacare website contract.

As reported by the Washington Examiner in early October, the Department of Health and Human Services reviewed only CGI’s bid for the Obamacare account. CGI was one of 16 companies qualified under the Bush administration to provide certain tech services to the federal government. A senior vice president for the company testified this week before The House Committee on Energy and Commerce that four companies submitted bids, but did not name those companies or explain why only CGI’s bid was considered.

On the government end, construction of the disastrous Healthcare.gov website was overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a division of longtime failed website-builder Kathleen Sebelius’ Department of Health and Human Services.

Update: The Daily Caller repeatedly contacted CGI Federal for comment. After publication of this article, the company responded that there would be “nothing coming out of CGI for the record or otherwise today.” The company did however insist that The Daily Caller include a reference to vice president Cheryl Campbell’s House testimony. This has been included as a courtesy to the company.

Via: Daily Caller

Continue Reading.....