Obama’s VA Killed Nearly As Many Soldiers As Afghan War, Per Year
Published by AJStrata at 1:11 pm under All General Discussions,VA Scandal,VA Tech Massacre
Addendum: Let me head this off up front. While the total number of soldiers dying (on average) in Afghanistan is 139 per year and on VA waiting lists is “over 100″ per year, the percent dying will tilt in favor of the VA who should see more soldiers each year than Afghanistan does. With that sad – each individual life is precious, and that fact the VA wait list can kill as many as the KIAs in Afghanistan is scandalous. If someone is running to percentages to try and make the case the VA is not as bad as Afghanistan, maybe they can explain why waiting for medical service in the US should be as deadly as fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda? - end addendum
The above is the Veterans Administration mission statement. It is an oath to those who defended this nation by risking their lives. It was an oath given to this nation’s veterans – as noted- by President Abraham Lincoln.
But it turns out the Obama VA itself is nearly as deadly as all our recent war efforts:
More than 1,000 veterans have died over the last decade as a result of a failure to provide care or malpractice by the Department of Veterans Affairs, according to the findings of a new report authored by retiring Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK).
The report, “Friendly Fire: Death, Delay, and Dismay at the VA,” complies the findings of a number of government and media investigation and concludes that many more veterans lost their lives as a result of VA negligence than the 23 deaths to which the department has admitted.
“The problems at the VA are worse than anyone imagined,” Coburn said.
“Over the past decade, more than 1,000 veterans may have died as a result of VA malfeasance,” the senator added. “Poor management is costing the department billions of dollars more and compromising veterans’ access to medical care.”
Emphasis mine. This says more than 100 veterans died each year on average (which I would guess was low early on and has been rising in terms of actual deaths per year as more and more vets have been delayed medical assistance). How does that compare to Afghanistan and Iraq wars? Let’s see.
Per this DoD site the Afghan total KIA to date are 1816. If you average that over 13.5 years it comes to KIA 139 per year on average. That means abuse and neglect at the VA is almost as deadly as fighting in Afghanistan. For the Iraq war 2010 to 2011 (operation New Dawn) under Obama the KIA is 38 over one year. This means the death rate in Iraq was around one third that of the VA – clearly not good. Overall in Iraq the yearly rate was nearly 500/year, just to be clear.
It is truly sick how the Obama VA hid the truth of this scandal:
DeWenter alleged that at least seven times since October, she has noticed that the details of veterans’ deaths “were physically altered, or written over, by someone else” and those vets were relisted as living.
“The alterations had even occurred in recent weeks, she said, in a deliberate attempt to try to hide just how many veterans died while waiting for care, by trying to pretend dead veterans remain alive,” CNN reported.
DeWenter says that the changes were made in order to hide the fact that some veterans died while waiting for care:
“I would say (it was done to) hide the fact. Because it is marked a death. And that death needs to be reported. So if you change that to, ‘entered in error’ or, my personal favorite, ‘no longer necessary,’ that makes the death go away. So the death would never be reported then.”
“No longer necessary” – nice.
When you compare the VA’s mission statement to this abhorrent behavior (to gain bonuses no less) brings out the cruel starkness of this scandal. Heads should roll (and email collected now, before anymore computers have a “Lerner Failure”. There is no time to waste, since maybe 10 vets die to negligence of the VA each month.
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/20387
