Nicholson stalled program to aid wounded vets.
By on Mar 7th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
Nicholson stalled program to aid wounded vets.
“A proposal to keep seriously wounded vets from falling through the cracks of the bureaucracy was shelved in 2005 when Jim Nicholson took over as the secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department,” ABC News reports. “As a result, seriously wounded veterans continued to face long delays for health care and benefit payments after being discharged from the military, says former VA program manager Paul Sullivan. … Sullivan said he was told the cost of the system — less than $1 million to build and requiring a handful of staff to maintain — was prohibitive.”
View Most Popular
Advertisement
Visit Our Affiliated Sites
What We're About
What We're Fighting For
What We're Fighting Against
Featured
Subscribe to the Progress Report
Got a hot tip?
Have a hot news tip? We'd love to hear from you. Use the form below to send us the latest.
Reports
In depth studies on select topics
Topic CloudView topics sorted by popularity
Afghanistan
Bailout
Big Oil
Bolton
Bush
Cheney
Civil Rights
Congress
Earmarks
Economy
Energy
Environment
Ethics
Fox News
Global Warming
Guantanamo
Health Care
Immigration
International Relations
Iran
Iraq
Justice
Kristol
LGBT
Lieberman
McCain
McClellan
Media
Military
O'Reilly
Obama
Palin
Politics
Race
Radical Right
Religion
Rice
RNC Convention
Rove
Terrorism
Third Bush Term
Torture
Veterans
Wiretapping
Women's Rights
ArchivesBlog Roll
Of course, he did! It’s policy — F*ck the Troops.
March 7th, 2007 at 9:36 pm“starving the beast”…
…a bedrock right wing ideology…
…to destroy the people’s faith in the concept of centralized government…
March 7th, 2007 at 9:45 pmhacker bob, nice to know your President is soooo supportive of the troops…at least when he can march them out in lockstep for a backdrop photo-op.
Not so supportive when it comes to giving them the proper body armor, or armored vehicles, or training, or equipment, or MEDICAL CARE when they get injured due to the lack of the above!!!
Now, you and I both have problems with inaction on the part of the Democratic Party, but at least the Democratic Party, especially those on the “fringe left” actually care for our women and men in uniform. We’re not just lip-service photo-ops. We have the courage to say, “GET OUR TROOPS OUT OF HARM’S WAY! NO MORE BLOOD FOR OIL” and, for God’s sake, treat them well, give them the best medical care, should they come home wounded physically, mentally, or spiritually. We owe them that much, for having sent them into hell in the first place.
Can you dare focus your anger where it truly belongs? (do you even know where to focus?)
March 7th, 2007 at 10:04 pm#2, bp
Spot on again!!
Underlying all of this is the philosophy spoken by Grover Norquist.
March 7th, 2007 at 10:11 pmCut all government until you can flush it down the drain. To do that, you must cut programs to the bare bones, then when nothing works, the people will agree that the government is useless. We saw it up close in New Orleans and we are seeing it every day in more subtle ways. But it’s there, growing like a fungus.
Comment by Marie — March 7, 2007 @ 10:11 pm
so we will turn to the benevolent Corporations, to whom every public service has been outsourced, at a profit. Then Government by the people and for the people will only exist as a shadow for the ruling class/puppet masters who pull the strings on the ignorant and subservient masses.
March 7th, 2007 at 10:18 pmNow we are told that Jim Nicholson, a Bush appointee, is part of a dastardly plot to neglect the soldiers being treated at Walter Reed. Sigh … It seems obvious that most of the mass media are determined to miss the point of the Walter Reed scandal. There’s a kind of projected solipsism at work here. It’s always about Bush, no matter what “it†is. Meanwhile, an important issue—the incredible inefficiency of government-run healthcare—will be ignored.
March 7th, 2007 at 10:49 pmNicholson is unfit to head the V.A. His qualification? Head of the Republican National Committee or something similar.
Just as qualified as “heck of a job” Brownie.
Must be fired immediately. He has done great damage to the V.A. and all veterans by being BushChaney’s hatchet man.
Send him to Iraq.
March 7th, 2007 at 10:49 pmIf perfidy had an illustration in the dictionary, it would be a portrait of Jim Nicholson. He has spearheaded the Bush Administration’s policy to lowball veteran’s healthcare since they canned Tony Principi after the ‘04r election.
This is a quote from a GAO report to congress dated 2-1-06:
“VA lacked a methodology for making the health care management efficiency savings assumptions reflected in the President’s budget requests for fiscal years 2003 through 2006 and, therefore, was enable to provide us with any support for those estimates. VA officials told us that the management efficiency savings assumed in these requests were savings goals used to reduce requests for a higher level of annual appropriations in order to fill the gap between the cost associated with VA’s projected demand for health care services and the amount the President was willing to request.†You can read the whole report and weep at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d06359r.pdf
The shoddy accounting practices VA is being criticized for are simply lies they were forced to tell congress to cover up for the Bush administration’s deliberate underfunding of veteran’s health care for the last 4 years. All this while sending vets into harm’s way. What a disgrace!
It’s especially galling to listen to George W. Bush professing how much he cares about vets after deliberately and systematically screwing them.
March 7th, 2007 at 10:57 pmIt’s always about Bush, no matter what “it†is. Meanwhile, an important issue—the incredible inefficiency of government-run healthcare—will be ignored.
Comment by David
He’s the Captain of the ship, David.
Ya’ll would do no less for Clinton.
March 7th, 2007 at 11:10 pmJim Nicholson, the Sec. of Veterans Affairs, has experience as a real estate lawyer, started a company building custom homes, and was made ambassador to the Vatican because of his work electing Republicans. That should make him extremely capable to head Veterans Affairs.
Oh yes, he was in Vietnam 35 or 40 years ago, too.
March 7th, 2007 at 11:20 pmIs it not interesting that this same Prez (Bush)who went Awol when it was his time to serve now likes to dress in miltary garb and pretend he and our military men are one and the same.
March 7th, 2007 at 11:24 pmA true coward has no shame or conscience folks.
I thought the problems with Walter Reed was that it was undergoing “privatization”. I could go on for hours about the advantage of government versus free-market healthcare—but what’s the point?
I could not do David’s comprehending for him.
We are the only developed country in the world without government-run healthcare. Noone wants our system because it is unbelieveably inefficient. 47,000,000 with no healthcare at all and we still spend at least twice as much per capita as anyone else.
Consumer Reports says Americans would save about $250 billion yearly by switching to single-payer.
Medicare (government-run) is extremely more efficient than the 2,000 private insurers.
March 7th, 2007 at 11:29 pmMeanwhile, an important issue—the incredible inefficiency of government-run healthcare—will be ignored.
Comment by David — March 7, 2007 @ 10:49 pm
David, then can you please explain why the U.S. spends fully twice as much per capita on healthcare as the so-called welfare states of Europe, yet, by nearly every quantitative outcome-based measure, delivers much worse care to its population? What’s that? You can’t explain it? Just what I thought.
March 7th, 2007 at 11:55 pmJim Nicholson is also the republican who fed phony stories and talking points about Gore to the corporate media during the 2000 election. He ran a program of distortion and misinformation about Gore which helped shape Gore as a phony, while selling Bush as “authentic.”
He’s dripping with blood.
March 7th, 2007 at 11:58 pmFor a fine article on Walter Reed. written today, go here:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/scoop/issues/070307scoop.html
March 7th, 2007 at 11:58 pmJim Nicholson is a republican hack, he is not veteran, he never cared about veteran affairs. He is a follower of Norquist philisophy.
March 8th, 2007 at 12:17 amHe was appointed by Bush because is a “good conservative” and political operative.
You can see the results.
Meanwhile, an important issue—the incredible inefficiency of government-run healthcare—will be ignored.
Comment by David — March 7, 2007 @ 10:49 pm
If government-run healthcare is inefficient, it is because the Corporate sponsors who wrote the bills which then became law want it that way.
March 8th, 2007 at 1:30 amPhilip Mattera article at tompaine.com
March 06, 2007
Philip Mattera heads the Corporate Research Project
Reports of substandard conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center have outraged the country. But that anger should not be directed only at the callous Army officials running the facility.
The full story behind the scandal involves a misguided program to “reinvent government†through outsourcing, a company that botched the delivery of ice to victims of Hurricane Katrina and a giant hedge fund led by a former member of President Bush’s cabinet. The private sector has indirectly had a hand in converting the once legendary Walter Reed into a symbol of the shameful treatment of people who have been maimed in the service of their country.
The dismal state of some facilities at Walter Reed cannot be directly attributed to poor performance by a contractor. After all, it has been only a few months since a politically connected firm called IAP Worldwide Services started taking over many of the management functions at the medical center.
Yet a battle over whether to outsource those functions has been going on since early 2000, when the Army commenced a cost-comparison study of support services at the medical center. Such studies—which were being promoted by the Clinton administration’s “reinventing government†initiative led by Vice President Al Gore—forced groups of federal workers to compete with potential contractors to figure out which could perform a given function more efficiently.
The process dragged on for several years, and finally it was determined that the bid by federal civilian employees at Walter Reed was the better one. However, that decision was overturned by the Army Audit Agency, which was upheld by the GAO on a technicality. This allowed IAP to get a five-year, $120 million contract.
Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has been gathering evidence that the prospect of outsourcing (and likely job cuts) had a detrimental effect on morale and efficiency at Walter Reed. That idea is not just theory. Last September, Walter Reed Garrison Commander Peter Garibaldi sent an internal memorandum to his superiors warning that substantial numbers of skilled workers were leaving because of the impending takeover by IAP.
It is also possible that managers at Walter Reed were letting things slide, knowing that any problems would soon be dumped in the lap of a contractor. While it may not be possible to quantify, there is every reason to believe that the drawn-out outsourcing process and the controversial reversal of the initial finding in favor of the federal workforce contributed to the deterioration of physical conditions at the medical center.
And all this was to create a new revenue opportunity for IAP. The company is an odd choice to help manage one of the nation’s premier military medical facilities. It was founded in 1989 by a South Carolina entrepreneur who enlisted the help of a logistics expert who had recently left the Army. They rode the rising wave of military outsourcing in the 1990s, specializing in supplying electric generators, while also getting federal civilian contracts for prosaic functions such as providing ice in natural disasters (a responsibility it later botched during Hurricane Katrina). Last year IAP got a $103 million contract to handle file management at the IRS but was unable to get up and running by the specified start date.
Management of the company is now in the hands of Al Neffgen and David Swindle, two former executives with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root—one of the giants of military outsourcing and the subject of numerous allegations about overcharging the federal government. Today, IAP’s board of directors includes former Vice President Dan Quayle, a former commandant of the Marines and a former vice chief of staff of the Air Force. Such connections have undoubtedly helped the company rise up the ranks of federal contractors. Its volume of business with Uncle Sam has grown from about $222 million in 2000 to some $1.2 billion in 2005.
IAP’s growth has also been aided by the fact that it is controlled by the giant hedge fund Cerberus Capital Management, which has taken over dozens of companies and is now more of a conglomerate than an investment fund. Cerberus, like IAP, is no stranger to the revolving door. It is surely no coincidence that the hedge fund chose former Bush Treasury Secretary John Snow as its chairman a few months ago while IAP was intensifying its effort to take over a multi-billion-dollar military logistics contract now held by Halliburton.
The entire situation is a remarkable illustration of how the federal government has become a vehicle for the promotion of private interests. The zeal with which large contracts are awarded to a small universe of companies, with little attention paid to performance, suggests that outsourcing is less an effort to improve efficiency and more a matter of enriching those with the right connections.
But this time the privatization game may have backfired in the face of the Bush administration and its friends in the corporate world. It is one thing to screw workers—unfortunately, that’s now considered business as usual—but in the case of Walter Reed the ultimate victims are a much more revered group. The stark evidence that the Bush Administration, for all its rhetoric about supporting the troops, is much more interested in supporting the contractors, could be leading to a political earthquake.
March 8th, 2007 at 2:14 amNicholson should be forced to resign and indicted for criminal neglect of veterans!
March 8th, 2007 at 7:35 amUnder Clinton, both FEMA and Veteran’s Affairs were model departments. They have been transformed by the “Grover Norquist” brand of public service into shameful failures because they’ve been run by political ideologues who think that government services should not exist. As a consequence, bodies float in the flooded streets of New Orleans and Veterans lie neglected in filthy conditions while our tax money goes to fatten the wallets of Republican campaign donors. This is what happens when Republicans are unchecked and in charge of government.
March 8th, 2007 at 8:36 am[…] Nicholson stalled program to aid wounded vets. from Think Progress by Nico […]
March 8th, 2007 at 8:38 amand we spent $600 M on a friggin’ embassy in Baghdad. What the hell is going on????
March 8th, 2007 at 8:43 am#20 Peter is correct. Every single program ever conceived to help the general populace was vehemently opposed by Republicans. They opposed Social Security under FDR, and they opposed national health care when it was proposed by both Truman and Eisenhower.
I hate Neocons, Republicans, mega-corporatists, etc. and I’m not ashamed to admit it. They are messing up our planet and our quality of life. I don’t forgive deliberate and willful ignorance.
March 8th, 2007 at 8:49 am#2 bp and #5 BnF
I don’t understand why it is so hard for people to see what is happening before their eyes.
When these dirtballs reveal themselves for who and what they are, we should take note, yet, even when they “advertise” their plan, we somehow ignore what they have advocated.
I am a person of only average intelligence, yet this is apparent to me. And to you guys also. We only need to look at the facts.
No point in bemoaning the lack of media attention to explaining all of this, not when Nicole and Britney are so much more fun.
March 8th, 2007 at 10:16 amAs I read further down, I see there are others here who also recognize the facts of what is happening with the Norquist version of government.
March 8th, 2007 at 10:18 amhttp://www.peace-action.org/
———————————-
We give ordinary people
the tools to change the world.
About Peace Action
Peace Action, the merger of SANE and The Nuclear Freeze, has effectively mobilized for peace and disarmament for nearly fifty years.
As the nation’s largest grassroots peace group we get results: from the 1963 treaty to ban above ground nuclear testing, to the 1996 signing of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, from ending the war in Vietnam, to blocking weapons sales to human rights abusing countries, and eliminating funding for new nuclear weapons, Peace Action and its 100,000 members have been, and continue to be, at the forefront of the international movement for peace.
At Peace Action we believe…
…that war is not a suitable response to conflict.
For nearly 50 years Peace Action has worked for an environment where all are free from violence and war. We understand that long standing global conflicts require long-term solutions, and that US foreign policy has a lasting effect on the world. We are working to promote a new US foreign policy that is based on peaceful support for human rights and democracy, reducing the threat from weapons of mass destruction, and cooperation with the world community. We are against pre-emptive war, and call for a full withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.
…that every person has the right to live without the threat from nuclear weapons.
There are still over 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world. The US and Russia still have thousands of nuclear weapons, on hair trigger alert—ready to launch in minutes. While the Cold War may have ended, the nuclear threat has not. The only way to ensure that nuclear weapons will never be used - whether purposefully, or accidentally - is global abolition. The U.S. must lead the way to a safer world by taking our weapons off hair trigger alert, halting our research and development of new nuclear weapons and disarming and demilitarizing our warhead stockpile of over 10,000 nuclear warheads. We can reduce the threat to the world posed by nuclear weapons, but we must start by getting serious about getting rid of our own weapons of mass destruction.
…that America has the resources to both protect and provide for its citizens.
As the Pentagon’s budget soars to $400 billion, 17% of American children live in poverty. Basic infrastructure is crumbling, school are using outdated textbooks, and millions of Americans are without basic health insurance.
For what the US will spend on the War in Iraq, 26,701,621 children could have attended a year of Head Start, we could have built 1,815,194 additional housing units for the poor, we could have hired 3,493,706 additional public school teachers for one year, and we could have provided 9,772,998 students four-year scholarships at public universities(source – National Priorities Project). We believe that these are priorities that should come before war.
What we do at Peace Action…
We are the nation’s largest grassroots Peace network, with over 28 state affiliates, and over 100 local chapters. We organize our grassroots network to place pressure on Congress and the Administration through write-in campaigns, internet actions, citizens lobbying and direct action. Through a close relationship with progressive members of Congress, we play a key role in devising strategies to move forward peace legislation, and, as a leading organizing member of United for Peace and Justice and the Win Without War coalition, we lend our expertise and large network to achieving common goals.
Through our Peace Voter awareness campaigns, we inform citizens about their choices for both local and national campaigns, by highlighting different candidates’ stances on issues relating to peace. Our annual Congressional Voter Guide gives credit to those in Congress who voted for a peaceful future, while holding accountable those who voted for larger Pentagon budgets, spending tax dollars on nuclear weapons, and voted for wars of aggression and occupation.
Given the right tools, ordinary people can change the world.
At Peace Action, we recognize that real change comes from the bottom up and we are committed to educating and organizing at the grassroots level.
When you join Peace Action you become part of an effective citizen movement. We work hard to keep you informed through our quarterly newsletter and publications about the most important news and issues in the peace movement. As a member you can join our Action Alert Network which allows citizens throughout the country to rapidly respond to important legislation online. As a member, you can become an important part of a fast growing national movement, and help us change the direction of our country and the world towards a more sustainable, peaceful future.
Together, we have the power to change the world.
Support Peace.
http://www.peace-action.org/
March 8th, 2007 at 5:42 pmNicholson and Kiley SHOULD BOTH BE HORSE-WHIPPED TO WITHIN AN INCH OF THEIR MISERABLE LIVES AND I WOULD BE GLAD TO VOLUNTEER FOR SUCH AN ENJOYABLE TASK!!!!! PROVIDING I GET TO CHOOSE THE CAT-O-NINE-TAILS TIPPED WITH RAZOR WIRE!!!!!
March 8th, 2007 at 9:52 pm[…] In the wake of the Walter Reed revelations, President Bush appointed Nicholson to lead a special panel to “cut through red tape” affecting veterans. But veterans advocates say it was Nicholson’s “inept management of the VA [that] has lead to the red tape.” ABC News revealed last week that Nicholson shelved a program that could have avoided many of the bureaucratic delays plaguing injured vets because of its cost — less than $1 million. […]
March 11th, 2007 at 3:29 pm