Gun-grabbing crisis vultures just can’t let the latest mass shootings go to waste. “Red flag” laws are now all the rage in the Beltway as the magic pill to prevent homicidal maniacs from wreaking havoc on the nation.
Even President Donald Trump has endorsed the idea of preemptively confiscating people’s firearms if they are deemed a “threat.”
But if you want to know how this American version of China’s social credit system would work in practice, let me remind you of how Veterans Affairs recklessly red-flags “disruptive” citizens without due process, transparency, or accountability in the name of “safety.”
Government bureaucrats routinely deprive our nation’s heroes of medical treatment based on arbitrary definitions of who and what constitutes a mental health menace.
The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution.Find out more >>
I first reported on the VA’s secretive database on “disgruntled” and “disruptive” vets five years ago. Under the VA policy on “patient record flags,” federal bureaucrats can classify vets as “threats” based on assessments of their “difficult,” “annoying,” and “noncompliant” behavior.........To Read More....
I try not to pay much attention to the staffing decisions of President Trump’s “Boston-phone-book presidency.” Yes, I realize those choices are important, but my focus is policy.
As such, I don’t have any strong opinions on the ouster of David Shulkin, the now-former Secretary at the Department of Veterans Affairs. But I definitely have something to say about whether America’s military vets should be consigned to an inefficient (at best) and costly form of government-run healthcare.
Here are some excerpts from a report in USA Today.
A USA TODAY investigation found the VA — the nation’s largest employer of health care workers — has for years concealed mistakes and misdeeds by staff members entrusted with the care of veterans. …In some cases, agency managers do not report troubled practitioners to the National Practitioner Data Bank, making it easier for them to keep working with patients elsewhere. The agency also failed to ensure VA hospitals reported disciplined providers to state licensing boards. In other cases, veterans’ hospitals signed secret settlement deals with dozens of doctors, nurses and health care workers that included promises to conceal serious mistakes — from inappropriate relationships and breakdowns in supervision to dangerous medical errors – even after forcing them out of the VA. …The VA has been under fire in recent years for serious problems, including revelations of life-threatening delays in treating veterans in 2014 and efforts to cover up shortfalls by falsifying records.
So what’s the answer? How can we fix a dysfunctional bureaucracy?
The honest answer is that we can’t. Inefficiency, sloth, and failure are inherent parts of government (yes, the free market also is far from perfect, but at least there’s a profit-and-loss incentive that rewards good firms and punishes bad ones).
So it’s time to get the private sector involved. Though I noted in the TV discussion that not all privatization is created equal. If the government simply contracts with selected healthcare providers, that could be a recipe for cronyism since politicians would try to help their campaign contributors.
I much prefer the advance-funding model developed by Chris Preble and Michael Cannon, which would give active-duty service members added money, up front, to purchase a benefits package to cover future costs related to their military service.
For what it’s worth, former VA Secretary Shulkin, in a recent column for the New York Times, was very critical of privatization. But it isn’t clear whether he was referring to the contracted-out version or the advance-funding version.
I am convinced that privatization is a political issue aimed at rewarding select people and companies with profits, even if it undermines care for veterans. …individuals, who seek to privatize veteran health care as an alternative to government-run V.A. care, unfortunately fail to engage in realistic plans regarding who will care for the more than 9 million veterans who rely on the department for life-sustaining care. …privatization leading to the dismantling of the department’s extensive health care system is a terrible idea.
As I said at the end of my interview, a private healthcare provider might get a contract via cronyism, but it still would be a better option for vets since that company presumably wouldn’t let them die on secret waiting lists.
And since the advance-funding option obviously would be for future veterans, we do need a better market-based approach for current veterans.
I’ll close by sharing a Politico article on the infamous boondoggle that got Shulkin in trouble.
Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin’s chief of staff altered an email to create a pretext for taxpayers to pay for Shulkin’s wife to accompany him on a 10-day trip to Europe last summer, the agency’s inspector general reported… The report by Inspector General Michael Missal also claims that Shulkin improperly accepted a gift of Wimbledon tickets during the trip, and a VA employee’s time was misused planning tourist activities for Shulkin and his entourage. …the VA paid for Shulkin’s wife’s airfare, which cost more than $4,300.
This obviously does not reflect well on Shulkin. But the real scandal almost certainly is that the trip to Europe occurred. We don’t know how many bureaucrats participated and what supposedly was going to be achieved by this junked, but I’m guessing the total tab was enormous and the total value was zero. The fact that taxpayers also were saddled with the cost of Shulkin’s wife’s trip merely added insult to injury.
P.S. Since money isn’t unlimited, I think the focus should be on helping veterans injured in battle rather than providing lavish benefits to anyone and everyone who ever wore a uniform.
By Constitution.com May 30, 2017 From the Daily Caller News Foundation: A notoriously corrupt Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) manager fired in the first day of President Donald Trump’s presidency–to rousing acclaim from veterans who heralded it as a sign of lasting reform–has been returned to work by VA officials after he filed a civil-service protections appeal. The return of the Puerto Rico hospital director is the latest example of Trump’s reform efforts encountering the entrenchment of what he has called Washington’s swamp, and comes in the same month a court ruled that the VA may not even be able to fire the Phoenix hospital director, who is a convicted felon as a result of job-related misconduct......To Read More....
The Department of Veterans Affairs has a simple, but crucial mission. The agency’s website quotes President Lincoln’s promise to veterans to describe it:
‘To care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan’ by serving and honoring the men and women who are America’s Veterans.
Last week, the Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Subcommittee on Economic Opportunities held a joint hearing because many Veterans Affairs employees are performing union activities instead of fulfilling the mission of the agency............ it also takes away millions of dollars away from caring for veterans to subsidize federal employee unions. In 2008, according to Office of Personnel Management, official time cost nearly $30 million. In 2012, the price tag for official time jumped to almost $47 million, a 36 percent increase over just a four year period.
Unfortunately, those numbers are mere estimations―and lowball ones at that................Union official time is a federal-wide practice that does not serve a public purpose and should be eliminated. Hopefully, in this Congress, elected officials will address this waste......To Read More.....\
My Take - What has gone on at the VA has been a disgrace......for years!!!! If Congress really wants to fix this all they have to do is send a few of these people to jail. If any of the reports I've been reading over the last two year are true then someone has clearly violated some federal law. As for those who didn't violate the law with their outrageous conduct and expenditures.....they need to be sued. Someone has to be held accountable! There's nothing like a good criminal or civil penalty to get people's heads on right.
The mainstream media have been ignoring a story of outrageous abuse by federal employees that has just been rubber-stamped by Loretta Lynch’s prosecutors at the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office. The first report was carried by the Houston Chronicle on Tuesday and picked up by the Washington Examiner yesterday. It is enough to make any taxpayer’s blood boil and has great potential as a news story. Yet for the moment, it exists in one Texas city and the conservative blogosphere only. Sarah Westwood reports for the Examiner........Read more
‘Doping the vote’ in South Texas triggers federal
indictments - Shady ballot brokers are “doping the vote” in the
Rio Grande Valley, an election-watch group says. Now the FBI is on the case.
“(The politiqueras) took voters to their weed man after voting,” Logan
Churchwell, a spokesman for True the Vote, told Watchdog.org. Trafficking in
petty cash and dime bags, politiquerasround up voters for South Texas
candidates, nearly all Democrats. The pay-for-ballot activity has resulted in 11
federal indictments so far. Republicans are turning up the heat on state Democratic
Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa, a Brownsville resident and longtime
political kingmaker in the Rio Grande Valley.
Drink up! Taxpayers back bad loans for country clubs,
boats, wineries - The Small Business Administration has backed
loans for wineries, country clubs and boat dealers who couldn’t pay back the
loans. There have been more than $8.7 billion in unpaid debts since taxpayers
started partly funding the loans that are supposed to be covered by fees on lenders…
Vermont's middle class is hurting - I recently
wrote about how Vermont is leading the nation in the growth in income
inequality, despite (or, as I believe, because of) the expanding list of
progressive policies Vermont has enacted over the past few decades. Two other
reports highlight a corresponding fact that Vermont’s middle class is dying
faster than every other state but one – California. One report by the Pew
Charitable Trust shows that Vermont’s middle class declined by 5 percentage
points (From 52.4 percent to 47.4 percent) between 2000 and 2013. The second,
by 24/7
Wall Street looks at the more recent time frame between 2009 and 2013, in
which Vermont’s middle class income growth declined by 5.9 percent — the second
worst record in the nation. As this report states:….Vermont[’s] progressive
experiment has blown up in the faces of our middle class….
Six months after New Jersey red light cameras go
dark,world hasn’t ended - Red light cameras were supposed to
reduce crashes in New Jersey and make people safer, but since cameras stopped
issuing tickets, pedestrians and drivers may actually be less likely to get
into an accident. The red light camera lobby warned of the dire consequences if
New Jersey’s cameras went dark. And in the six months since, they claim Jersey
drivers are back to their old ways, running red lights with reckless abandon.
In the first three months after the cameras went dark, red light running
reportedly surged in one city. The Traffic Safety Coalition, a group that
includes red light camera company Redflex among its ‘partners,’claims
that red light running increased by 116 percent in three months. The
coalition even put out this video touting the numbers:……
Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s combination presidential campaign
and Obamacare promo tour stopped this week in North Carolina - A
local TV host asked Kasich — one of few Republicans to embrace Obamacare’s
Medicaid expansion— what he would say to North Carolina lawmakers “adamantly
against” expanding Medicaid. “We’ve taken $14 billion over the next seven years
back to our state, of Ohio money that we sent to Washington,” Kasich
replied Monday before defending the program’s benefits for drug addicts,
the mentally ill and the working poor. Obamacare promises an open-ended stream
of new federal Medicaid funding; there’s no pool of Ohio or California or North
Carolina money for states to dip into. Every state expanding Medicaid increases
the total cost. Kasich’s attempt to obscure the facts didn’t surprise Mitch
Kokai, communications director for North
Carolina’s free-market John Locke Foundation. Kasich, Kokai said, hasn’t
simply tried to justify his decision to expand Medicaid but has“doubled down on
it and said others should do the same.” Kasich’s Obamacare expansion cost $3.7 billion in
its first 17 months and is already $1 billion over budget. Enrollment is
much higher than projected, and so are costs per enrollee.
Lawmakers: Failing schools need more than just money - Philadelphia
schools are in line for a $70 million bailout from the City Council this
week.But money will only solve so many of the problems facing the School
District of Philadelphia. According to a pair of lawmakers, turning around its
worst schools req uires more than just dollars and cents. State Reps. John
Taylor, R-177th District, and Jordan Harris, D-186th, represent Philadelphia
and both support legislation aimed at changing the way the state turns around
the city’s worst schools. “For failing schools, money alone is not the
solution,” the two wrote in an op-ed. “Statewide, there are 150 schools that
are, by any measure, not serving their families. And they have consistently
underperformed — in many cases, for more than a decade — despite receiving $1.3
billion in public funding last year alone.”…..
Report: Texas has $81 billion in hidden debt – Texas has $81 billion in hidden debt that doesn’t show up on balance
sheets, according to a new
study by Truth in Accounting. This means Texas is $62.6 billion short of
the money it needs to pay its long-term bills, which the group calculates as
equal to $8,300 per taxpayer. These figures do not include the $333
billion in bond debt run up by local government agencies, particularly
school districts. When it comes to calculating unfunded liabilities, a few
changes in assumptions can produce wildly different figures, so we took a
closer look at Truth in Accounting’s numbers. The surprise here is that, if
anything, Truth in Accounting is understating the magnitude of the
problem…….Even the new accounting rules can understate matters. Texas’ major
pension funds are advised by the same actuarial
firm that was telling Detroit it could increase benefits right up until the
city went bankrupt……Annual pension costs are calculated as a percentage of
payroll. In household terms, this is like scheduling balloon payments and
planning to cover them with a raise that never arrives. The result is much the
same: a debt snowball that takes up more and more of the monthly budget but
never shrinks…..
Lincoln schools to spend $150,000 to better ‘engage’ with
people - In the wake of last year’s purple penguin fiasco, the
Lincoln school board is on the brink of spending $150,000 to improve its
“community engagement.” A district spokeswoman says the outlay isn’t a direct
result of the controversy, but is intended to help the district better engage
with the community, either by helping staffers better address questions and
concerns or buying a software system, presumably to monitor social media. A
Nebraska middle school made national headlines after discouraging teachers from
calling students boys or girls. The school district generatednational
headlines after middle school staffers gave teachers training documents
advising them not to use “gendered expressions” by calling students“boys and
girls” or “ladies and gentlemen,” but to instead use more generic expressions
like campers, readers, athletes or even “purple penguins” to be more “gender
inclusive.”…
Drivers licenses for illegal immigrants now accepted as employment documents – A change in guidance from U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services makes driver’s licenses for illegals
acceptable ID for employment, creating a new shortcut for illegal immigrants to
get jobs. Federal law prohibits employers from hiring illegal immigrants.
However, a recent change by USCIS requires employers to accept driver’s
privilege cards as proof of identity, even though the cards are uniquely
granted to individuals with no legal presence in the country. According to guidance
USCIS issued in May, a driver privilege card issued by a state is an acceptable
List B document for I-9 employment forms “if it contains a photograph or
identifying information such as name, date of birth, sex, height, color of
eyes, and address.”…..
VA quietly drops criminal investigation of whistleblower
after year of intimidation - A social worker at a Louisiana
Veterans Affairs hospital is no longer under criminal investigation by his
employer for accessing a secret list that he used as proof to show that 2,700
vets languished – including 37 who died – awaiting care. It’s been a year since
Shea Wilkes, a decorated Army Reservist, went to the media
with evidence that the Overton Brooks VA Medical Center in Shreveport kept
an off-the-books appointment list. The nationwide scandal that followed cost
the VA secretary his job – and nearly cost Wilkes his position. He was demoted
and harassed, and saw any future advancement evaporate while the VA Inspector
General treated him as a suspect rather than a whistleblower. On June 24,
Wilkes’ attorney received a phone call: The Inspector General agents had
dropped their probe……
Will Colorado taxpayers be investors in Iran? - Since 2008,
Colorado’s Public Employees Retirement Association (PERA) has had a policy of
divesting from companies known to be doing substantial business in Iran. If the
recently-concluded agreement with Iran is upheld by Congress, that could be
about to change. The taxpayers of Colorado and PERA members could find their
retirement funds investing in that country. Daniel Greenfield, in Front
Page Magazine, reports that Article 25 of the agreement requires the US
government to pressure states and localities to adopt policies consistent with
the lifting of sanctions (emphasis added):……
Lord of the Nannies: One Nanny to Rule Them All - It’s been
two years since Mayor Bill de Blasiotook office in the Big Apple with a promise
to rid Manhattan of horse-drawn carriages. He’s still fighting to get the ban
through the city council, but it seems unlikely he’ll ever succeed. While the
mayor is worrying about transportation from the 19th century, members of the
city council are taking aim at the 20th century. A bill in front of the council
would ban the use of helicopters in New York City for sightseeing tours,
cracking down on an industry that thrills tourists and supports hundreds of
jobs simply because cranky city council members don’t like the noise. Because
if they could only get rid of the helicopters, New York City would be a quiet,
peaceful, tranquil place, right? Both proposed bans, according to recent news
reports, face the same opposition: a public that disagrees with them. The
Wall Street Journal, on Sunday, took a long look at de Blasio’s effort to shut
down the house-drawn carriages in and around Central Park. During his
mayoral campaign, he said the rides were inhumane and promised to shut down the
industry during his first week on the job.……..
Nanny State of theWeek: FDA bans trans-fats
- Enjoy your brownies, donuts and other shrink-wrapped snacks while they last.
That’s right, the federal government is coming for your stash of Hot Pockets,
popcorn and Ding-Dongs. The federal Food and Drug Administration approved new
rules last week that will effectively ban trans fats within three years,
forever changing the face of snacking and fast food. Specifically, the
FDA is going after partially hydrogenated oils, the main ingredient in the
trans fats that liter the diets of many Americans. Food companies have
until 2018 to remove the oils from their products. But does the government have
the power to force people to eat healthy? The FDA is charged, in part, with
protecting Americans from food that is unsafe to eat. They inspect meat, for
example, to make sure we’re not going to get mad cow disease. The agency is now
expanding that role to include trans fats, which the FDA has determined to be
“no longer safe for use in food…..
Union boss wants teachers waging war for ‘social justice’ - While most
Americans celebrated Independence Day, the National Education Association
bemoaned America’s lack of “social justice.” In a July 4 speech
bristling with leftist buzzwords, NEA executive director John Stocks implored
union members to be part of a national “progressive” movement. “America is not working for most Americans,” Stocks told several thousand
representatives of the union’s state and local affiliates at NEA’s annual
meeting. Stocks, a white male who was paid $412,398 with teachers union dues
last year, blamed the country’s struggles on income inequality and
institutional racism. “I personally believe that we cannot challenge
institutional racism without understanding the insidious entitlements of white
privilege in America,” Stocks said,
noting that he himself has benefited from “white privilege.”…..
Christie promises to ‘tell it like it is,’ but hides
truth in New Jersey- Chris Christie declared his candidacy for president
Tuesday, promising America that he would “tell it like it is.” But his track
record in New Jersey shows the governor has often gone to great lengths to hide
the truth from taxpayers. “We are going to tell it like it is,” Christie
proclaimed in a gymnasium packed with supporters at Livingston High School.
“The truth will set us free.” In contrast, the governor has often forced New
Jersey Watchdog and other news outlets to go to court to win release of public
records the governor and his administration have refused to disclose….
SCOTUS will hear Friedrichs v. California Teachers
Association case- The U.S. Supreme Court announced this morning it
will hear the case of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, which
seeks to eliminate agency shop fees that unions take from non-members. The
game-changing lawsuit argues that forcing public employees to pay fees to
unions they do not support is a violation of their First Amendment rights. The
announcement was made during Tuesday’s “cleanup” session before summer break.
The next regular SCOTUS conference is scheduled for September 28 and a decision
on Friedrichs is expected by June 30, 2016. “This is an excellent first step,”
Larry Sand, president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network, told
Watchdog. “We should know within a year if the justices will do the right thing
and let all teachers and other workers have a choice whether or not to pay dues
to a union, as is done in 25 states. We have choices everywhere else in life,
why not with union participation?” The Friedrichs case would determine if
workers should be required to pay “agency shop” fees to labor unions if they choose
not to be a member. In many states, employees who chose not to associate with
unions are still forced to pay a smaller membership fee for representation in
collective bargaining……
Starting Wednesday, Obamacare will punish businesses who
help employees with health care - Employers who reimburse their
workers for health care costs will face massive tax penalties beginning Wednesday.
Prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, with its mandate that all
Americans purchase insurance and requirement for businesses to offer employees
insurance plans, many small companies provided coverage by directly reimbursing
medical costs or for the cost of private insurance plans. Businesses do it
because that’s a less complicated process than dealing with an official health
insurance plan, but continuing to do so after July 1 could cost them hundreds
of dollars in fines each day….
Laid-off worker welfare program doesn't work, renewed
anyway-A billion-dollar
welfare program to help laid-off workers displaced by foreign competition has
been saved from extinction, even though it’s been judged ineffective and
wasteful according to the federal government’s own commissioned studies….
