By Betsy McCaughey
President Obama and the Veterans Administration bureaucracy are already sabotaging the VA-reform law passed in August.
The ink is barely dry on the 8.6 million “Choice Cards” that supposedly allow vets to see a doctor outside the delay-plagued VA system. But Obama’s budget tries to snatch the $10 billion allocated for choice and let VA top administrators spend it however they want. It’s a sickening betrayal.
Even worse, VA Secretary Robert McDonald is telling federal lawmakers that this underhanded move will better serve “VA system priorities.”
That’s the problem. He’s more interested in protecting “the system” than the vets. It’s all about bureaucratic turf and the interests served by the failed status quo.
With a straight face, McDonald says it has “nothing to do with us trying to gut the Choice Card or anything like that, it was about flexibility.” Flexibility for VA bureaucrats, not for ailing vets who need it.
Removing the funding definitely will gut the program, because the law says the Choice program expires whenever funding runs out.
At a Feb. 2 press briefing, VA administrators claimed without even a smirk that sick vets don’t want to see outside physicians, and that use of the Choice Cards was “much lower” than expected.
That’s a whopper. When asked, they couldn’t provide any specifics.
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