- FrontPage Magazine - http://www.frontpagemag.com -

Shinseki Wasn’t the Problem with the VA, Obama Was

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On May 30, 2014 @ 12:12 pm In The Point | 7 Comments

Shinseki should have resigned a while back and for the right reasons, but he wasn’t the problem with the VA. The military cost-cutting culture that Obama and his Center for American Progress backers brought into politics was.

The VA scandal is one of those events where the consequences of an ongoing policy reaches the public and Obama pretends to be as upset as the public expects him to be.

Whether or not the White House knew about the waiting list, the impulse to cut the costs of military health care came from the very top. Shinseki was implementing an administration policy. So were the VA people responsible. They may not have been told exactly how to implement it, but what happened was a consequence of a larger policy directive.

Like them, Shinseki is a scapegoat. He did a bad job, but he was ‘following orders’.

This year, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was pushing for cuts to Tricare benefits and claiming that military health care was dragging the defense budget down.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel defended dramatic Tricare fee hikes included in the Obama administration’s proposed 2014 budget on Thursday, telling Congress the changes “were among the most carefully considered and difficult choices” in the entire plan.

The budget calls for creating new enrollment fees for Tricare for Life, Tricare Standard and Tricare Extra health programs, and increasing deductibles and co-pays for prescription drugs, with the changes falling most heavily on working-age retirees under 65 and their families.

This wasn’t Chuck Hagel’s idea. Hagel was implementing an agenda pushed by the Center for American Progress, the think tank that had the most influence on Obama and whose staffers went on to play key roles in the administration.

Two years ago, I wrote about the Center for American Progress’ war on veterans.

The Tricare cuts are supposed to save 1.8 billion dollars, which we could just as easily save by eliminating aid to Egypt and Pakistan.

In 2011 the Center for American Progress issued a special paper deceptively titled, “Restoring Tricare” calling for higher premiums to “encourage responsible use” of Tricare benefits by veterans. CAP’s war on veterans was spearheaded by Lawrence Korb. Korb is a senior fellow at CAP and a senior adviser at the Center for Defense Information. Both are Soros linked organizations.

As part of the ax, enrollees will see a 400 percent health care premium increase over the next five years leading to hundreds or thousands more in expenses for veterans who are already facing a bad economy.

Older veterans will face an enrollment fee.  Also included is a doubling of the co-pay on prescription drugs at pharmacies and a tripling of the co-pay for mail order medication.

The VA has been bad for a long time, but no previous administration made cutting health care to vets on its budget priorities.

What happened at the VA came from the top down. It was dictated by anti-war special interests who were pursuing a larger agenda. A single resignation won’t change that. We have to stop pretending that this was an accident or a few bad apples.

What we should do is have a serious conversation about the agenda of Obama Inc. to slash military budgets with little concern for the lives of veterans.


Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://www.frontpagemag.com

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/shinseki-wasnt-the-problem-with-the-va-obama-was/

Copyright © 2009 FrontPage Magazine. All rights reserved.