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VA Cutbacks Threaten Vets: "Our United And Action Is Our Strength And Power"

By VVAW

There appears to be a popular trend in the media today to criticize, expose, and otherwise trash the Veterans Administration. The last six months has brought a stead flow of articles and report such as the major series in the Chicago Tribune that dominated the front page for over a week. Suddenly the spotlight is on the horrid VA hospitals, late checks and on and on.

Aside from the hell that millions of vets get put through by the VA recent events, like the death of VA patients at the Ann Arbor VA hospital, have raised a cry of indignation from the press. After numerous articles, the conclusion reached in nearly every case is that the VAA is either too big a mess to straighten out or it should be abolished and its services scattered to other federal agencies.

Spend a day at a VA office, talk to vets at any college, visit a VA hospital. It's won't take long to arrive at the conclusion that the VA doesn't work, nor will it ever in all probability.

The VA constitutes the third largest bureaucracy in the federal government. Founded in 1930, Congress established the VA to administer to veteran's needs. The VA quickly developed into a huge agency that selectively they find acceptable. The top VA post are kept within a very tight circle, appointed by the President.

The chief qualification for the top post of the VA is to be, or to have been, a national commander of one of the big veteran organizations, the like VFW or the American Legion, and to have faithfully carried out the tasks of promoting wars, pointedly trying to separate vets from other people and carrying out the work of the rich who run this country.

Richard Roudebush, the current VA Czar is no exception to this procedure of selection. A former national commander of the VFW and a member of Congress for 10 years, Roudebush's most notable achievement in Congress was the creation of Flag Day. His work in the VA has been an unparalleled attack upon the benefits of the veterans. Roudebush's cooperation with those who seek to cutback and dismantle the VA and his skillful manipulation of the yes-men leadership of the VFW, etc., has earned him the respect of the class he represents--the rich.

The VA with a 1976 budget of $18 billion continues to plod along. Rather than meeting the needs of veterans, the VA is systematically cutting back its services in several major areas. The VA is fully behind the current plan to cutback the GI Bill for vets and eliminate it entirely for future vets and eliminate it entirely for future vets. Top level bureaucrats of the VA have convinced the leadership of the large beterans organizations to give the nod to this attack. One example of this is with the Disabled American Veterans (DAV). The leadership of the DAV is currently calling on the rank and file membership to support the GI Bill cutoff. In one article in the February, 1976 issue of the DAV magazine, John J. Keller, National Director of Services even went so far to say that if you have our benefits cut its probably due to your own neglect and not the VAs.

Keller and his cohorts in other large vet's organizations are promising their respective rank and file a better time at the VA, if they help cut the throats of some other vets. We in VVAW have been at the VA offices and hospitals too many times to swallow this crap.

Take the case of the Korean vet who lost his leg on a land mine in Korea. His records indicate it isn't a service connected disability. Do the DAV, VFW, or American Legion officers at the VA do anything for him? Only if he raised hell. Then the VA director in that particular office will call them in to calm him down, promising to look into the case and the old "don't worry, we'll get in touch when something develops with our case" routine. Confronted with these and other stories, these vet pimps shrug their shoulders and say "well, these things happen, but for the most part, the VA takes good care of vets." We say this is bull!

The VA has had its problems for years but is now totally unable to meet the needs of the 29.1 million vets. Vietnam-era vets, unable to find work or an source of income are turning to the VA in record numbers. WWII vets, some in the 60s and 70s are becoming more and more dependent on the VA.

Just about every area of VA assistance has its particular but inter-related problems. These are several areas of the VA that are outstanding in their non-functioning.

CLAIMS - The words red-tape seem to be the universal feeling that vets have for the claims procedure at any VA facility. After waiting for hours in the receptions room, the vet is told to fill out some paperwork and wait hoping they can find his records. Each VA facility has a staff off ten or more people who spend 8 hours a day trying to find its lost records. According to a recent government survey, the VA uses 10,000 different form letters, pushed out 75 million pages of mail a year and spends $11 million on notes to itself. To handle this mountain of paperwork the VA has "skillfully" set up a system of 33 computers nationwide, in a pattern that appears to have been created by a group of drunks throwing darts at a map of the US. In typical fashion the VA expects to have this problem cleared up by 1980 with a new computer system. Hell, we can't wait that long!

LATE CHECKS - Every month hundreds of thousands of vets wonder where their education and disability checks are. Don't ask the VA--how would they know? Some of us don't see them the entire time we're in school.

The VA responded to the problem of late checks by setting up a $25 million a year program during the summer of 1974 to deal with late checks. Today, almost two years after the program was initiated it has proved a failure. When the program began an employee of the VA in Milwaukee taped a 7-way phone conversation of VA "heavies." The phone session dealt mostly with the need to establish a "vet-rep" program on campuses to head off militant vets with the stated purpose of "winning these vets back to having confidence in the VA." The vet-rep program is a bust and the checks are still late.

DISABILITIES - Everyday thousands of vets are having their disability payments cut to ribbons. Constant re-evaluation procedures by the VA are dropping the pay and eligibility scales. Vets are notified by mail of their re-examination. If the notification arrives late, he vet will lose most, if not all, of his monthly checks. Once the VA rules on a disability it is next to impossible to change it. The VA state their decisions are "final and conclusive and no other official or any court" can review them. It is nearly impossible for a vet to hire a lawyer for his case because a rule limits a lawyer's fee for a VA case to $10. To this the VA counters that "lawyers aren't necessary because we have vets organizations (VFW etc.) to provide representation for us."

The VA certainly didn't give those yes-men offices the VA because of their history of struggle for all vets. VVAW has taken up cases of vets around the country to fight for their disabilities and have own them, but with each case it took days of preparation. There are too many cases to fight them individually. Realizing this we took up these cases to build the unity among vets to show that only through that unity can we struggle against the VA to win many cases, not just one at a time.

HEALTH CARE & VA HOSPITALS - Healthcare at many of the 171 VA hospitals is shoddy at best. Some of the 171 hospitals are considered "spit and polish" showcases for visiting dignitaries, while a hospital in another part of the same state is a rat-hole build in the 1890s.

In nearly every case the quality of healthcare is under par. This doesn't reflect upon the workers and staff of these hospitals. In most cases they do the best they can despite understaffing, hard working conditions and crumby administration. VA workers in several cases have been outspoken about the VA situation. In one case, at the Allen Park VA near Detroit, a nursing assistant, Tim Wells, was fired for speaking out against hospital conditions and abuse of patients.

The following letter from a VA employee in California speaks to the current "reorganization" (cutbacks) in VA hospitals around the country.

"The Joint Commission of Accreditation of Hospitals is now reviewing all VA hospitals. So far, two VA hospitals. So far, two VA hospitals have failed (this review) and have been put on a year's probation. They are in San Diego and Sepulveda. Probation means that they have on year to correct (their) problems. If not, they lose all student interns, nurses, residents, work-study people, etc.

"If hospitals do not pass, it will mean a general breakdown in services and a chance for the VA to start massive cutbacks. Taking the Long Beach VA as an example, there are an average of 15-20 operations daily. This would be drastically reduced if there were a cutback, since a majority of the surgeons on each team are student interns and residents.

"The VA's response to these threatened closures is classic. Instead of trying to find the root cause for the failure of the hospitals in San Diego and Sepulveda it is resorting to trying to pass future reviews by making sure its paperwork is together."

The VA has submitted its fiscal year 1977 budget to Congress for approval. It has a cut its budget by $1.3 billion from 1976. The biggest cut will be on the GI Bill Education and Training Program. Additionally, the budget request shows a $95.8 million reduction for compensation and pension payments with future cuts promised.

All this while a record number of vets, particularly younger vets face the highest unemployment since the Great Depression. The year 1975 also brought the highest number of patients, (1.4 million in-patients and 15.6 million out-patients) in the entire history of the VA.

We cannot live with these cutbacks! Veterans have the right to these benefits. We, just like other people in the US have the right to decent healthcare and education. The VA is just like any other government agency slowly turning the screws on most people. We have to see the CA like any other part of the system that people are up against. As easy as it is to come to hate these idiot bureaucrats at the VA, the problem is actually much bigger than that; as long as we live under a system where profits come first, the VA, which is only one part of that economic system, will never function to take care of vets' needs. We can't reform the CA anymore than we can reform the CIA. Our fight is against the government and the class that controls it.

But as we build a unified, national vets movement we can and will struggle and learn form our struggle as we force the rich and their bureaucrats to cough up what we need. In the process, we'll learn that we don't need these parasites running things for us.