Monday, May 26, 2014

Funding and Bureaucracy are the VA problem not Shenseki

Bureaucracy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy
Wikipedia
A bureaucracy is "a body of non elective government officials" and/or "an administrative policy-making group." Historically, bureaucracy referred to government ...

Funding - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding
Wikipedia
Funding is the act of providing resources, usually in form of money (financing), or other values such as effort or time (sweat equity), for a project, a person, ..

I think the best way to describe this would be to compare the VA to our public school system here in the U.S.

The VA does not serve the veterans to who should be receiving healthcare. Instead it tends to serve the adminstrators jockeying for advancement within the governmental system.

In exactly the same way the public school system in the U.S. server Tenure, the Unions and the administration rather than the students. However, it also should be said that without the unions there would be a much lower quality of teachers who would actually choose to teach because it would even be less money than they are paid now. But, the end result is that public schools are not about teaching students they are actually about tenure and pay increases for teachers and administrators.

This is the same problem in the VA. On top of this is there isn't proper funding to give health care to all the veterans who need it. However, there doesn't appear to be a way to prioritize those who will die without that care either. So, if someone complains a lot or knows the right people they might survive by seeing a doctor with just a hangnail. But, a really seriously wounded soldier male or female because they aren't complaining to the right people are just going to die. This is the problem.

So, you could get the best administrator in the world (which Shenseki might be) but it isn't going to solve the problem until you change both the bureaucratic ways of doing things and have enough funding to make it work for everyone dying or not. Solving these problems is unbelievable complex and possibly not possible at all given the realities of Washington D.C. So changing adminstrators by firing Shenseki won't really do anything but shame a hero who should be praised and not put down, especially today on Memorial Day.

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