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The Veterans Bureau was elevated to a Department in 1989 by President Ronald Reagan.
This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey, Aughie?
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
N. Rodgers: I'm excellent. How are you?
J. Aughenbaugh: Good and once again listeners, one of the reasons why I'm so excited about today's podcast episode is we are continuing our series on Federal Government Cabinet departments. We are getting closer and closer to the last ones if you will.
N. Rodgers: This is the penultimate, I think.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah this is the next last.
N. Rodgers: Then we get my favorite and then homeland security. Then we are going to do for listeners a little preview. We are going to do the departments that never were.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Departments that have been proposed over the years and what they've been proposed to do.
J. Aughenbaugh: Some of them are pretty, you'd be like, we should have such a department. Some of them you're just like.
N. Rodgers: Why in the heck would we need a department for that?
J. Aughenbaugh: Why were there so many people on the crazy town bus? But today's episode is about Veterans Affairs.
N. Rodgers: Yeah. The thing about Veterans Affairs, can I just say? Veterans Affairs is I know listeners are going to think, wait Veterans Affairs is more recent than the Department of Education? Yes. Veterans Affairs as a department is 1989 right at the end of the Reagan administration. But Veterans as a concept of we should be looking out for Veterans is much older, right?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, and again, of all the federal government cabinet departments today, this one probably has had the longest gestation period. Because in doing our research for the podcast episode, and this just fascinated, please forgive me Nia for speaking for you. What really fascinated Nia and I was the United States government making a commitment to take care of Veterans can be traced back to colonial times, where the Continental Congress has actually passed legislation to take care of Revolutionary War Vets.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, and that makes perfect sense except it didn't even occur to me, that it did happen. But when you said it, I was like well, yeah. I thought they were just cut loose.
J. Aughenbaugh: I thought about it in terms of modern wars, because with modern wars, as the medical science technology improved and battlefield wounds no longer meant almost an immediate death, we would have so many Vets returning from various wars and we would need to take care of them.
N. Rodgers: And listeners, when Aughie says modern, what he means is Civil War, which I know is not modern to most of y'all. But at least part of why I thought it started around the Civil War time was because of the the Confederate Veterans homes in an around Richmond and this area and all over the South, I just assumed it started, but it makes much more sense that it would have been with our first war. We owe something to the people who freed us from British rule and gave their lives or gave their bodies in a way that back in the day, if you were a farmer and you didn't have limbs, that would have been a lot harder to farm. It would have been a lot harder to do those things.
J. Aughenbaugh: You basically could not go ahead and engage in the dominant economic activity in the country at the time. After the Revolutionary War, in 1811 the federal government authorized the first domicile medical facilities for Veterans. We basically, the federal government of the United States, ever since 1811 has made that kind of commitment. You also saw this was the first time in the early 1800s where the federal government created assistance programs to extend benefits to war Veterans for their widows' independence.
N. Rodgers: If a man goes off and he dies fighting a war for the United States, his wife is supported in some way.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. But the big change, and Nia you already referenced this, was following the Civil War. It wasn't necessarily the federal government, many states created Veterans homes. In part, this is understandable because both the Union and Confederate war efforts were state driven. When Lincoln was putting together the Union, if you will, war mobilization, he called upon states to provide a certain number based on their population to, if you will, send troops that would be part of the Union war effort. Likewise that's how the Confederacy did it. Each of the seceding states had an obligation in terms of the number of typically young men who were, to provide the effort. After the war ended, many states jumped in and said, we recruited. Then that was a war that was almost exclusively men were troops. But we recruited these men, now we need to take care of them.
N. Rodgers: It should be noted just as a for the record though, that did not include black folks.
J. Aughenbaugh: That is true.
N. Rodgers: Black men who served were not included in the benefits.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Communities may or may not have created facilities for folks.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: For black folks, black men but, they were not statewide facilities.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. But then with every successive war that the United States fought, you have the Civil War then you had the so-called Indian Wars. Then you add the Spanish American War. You had the Mexican Border Period, which as we've discussed when we looked at the Department of War, the Mexican Border Wars Period actually extended for 50, 60 years. From the 1830s, well into the 1880s and '90s but with each of those wars, as Veterans were discharged, the precedent had already been set. Where are the facilities? We need facilities to take care of these Veterans. But then the next big change comes with World War I, because interestingly enough, unlike the previous wars, where either Congress or the states decided after the war, hey, we need x. When the United States entered World War I, Congress actually created a new system of Veterans' benefits.
N. Rodgers: Okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: That was actually one of the stumbling blocks on the Congress responding positively to President Woodrow Wilson's request that Congress declare war because members of Congress were just like, okay, but what are we going to do for all of our Veterans that we're going to be sending to Europe?
N. Rodgers: So Congress is thinking ahead? Unusual for Congress. I mean Congress tends to be reactionary.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: They just tend to be reactionary to things. I'm not trying to be ugly. It did come out a little that way, but they do tend to respond post as opposed to pre.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Now, the thing about the World War I is that we also see a lot more mental health issues from World War I than we do from previous wars. World War I was mentally difficult on the people who fought it. Trench warfare is a horrible kind of warfare.
J. Aughenbaugh: I mean, you're spending weeks, if not months, fighting over less than a quarter mile or a couple of hundred yards of terrain.
N. Rodgers: Well, and the bombs. All of the armaments got better and, so they were targeting better and so lots of people were seeing the person next to them get blown up. Not an easy thing for you to process as a person.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then you had the creation and use of chemical weapons during World War I.
N. Rodgers: Which is just you breathing and then all of a sudden you being very ill from breathing.
J. Aughenbaugh: If you survived it, your conditions would last months, if not years afterwards or you may never recover.
N. Rodgers: There used to be a term and it is no longer used called shell shock.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Yes.
N. Rodgers: That a lot of Veterans from World War I experienced and so it's to me that as they built a stronger system, they built it just in time for a war that was modern warfare in a way that we had not had, and that was mentally, incredibly taxing.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. This is again, one of the themes that you see with modern warfare. We get better at killing but those who survive are damaged in ways that previously we had left untreated.
N. Rodgers: We see that in Vietnam.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. This notion of shell-shock today, we refer to it as PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. But back then, it was a rather controversial diagnosis because those in the medical profession were saying, okay, this particular soldier can't go back to the front lines and you had military officers who were like, but I need these people back at the front line.
N. Rodgers: There was suspicion. People were faking it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or they are cowards.
N. Rodgers: That just wasn't the case. I mean, obviously, there were a few people who fake whatever.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Yeah.
N. Rodgers: MASH used to have Klinger. Remember Klinger pretending to be insane?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Because.
N. Rodgers: Wearing dresses, which at the time was considered insane, although now would not raise an eyebrow. But, he pretended to be those things because he didn't want to be there. He wanted to go home. There are people who do that, but it is not a common thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. What you see with Nia, after World War I was the first, if you will recognize federal agency. In 1921, Congress combined the wide array of Veterans programs and they created the Veterans Bureau. I actually remember the Veterans Bureau in part because my great-grandfather talked about how older members of our family who fought in World War I received Veterans Bureau benefits. But what was really noteworthy about the Veterans Bureau was they started creating Veterans hospitals across the United States. Whereas before, it was more of a state government commitment. Post-world War I, you saw more of a federal government commitment to create hospitals to deal with and treat our Vets.
N. Rodgers: Okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: But even back then, these hospitals had a poor reputation.
N. Rodgers: Yeah. We're going to get to the controversies around the hospitals.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Because that just that carries through from 1921 to yesterday?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
J. Aughenbaugh: It is a pretty constant theme. This is all happening within a decade. In 1930, Hoover signed an executive order. For our long-term listeners, there are so many themes throughout our episodes. One of which is presidents who can't convince Congress to do something say.
N. Rodgers: I need an executive order.
J. Aughenbaugh: This was executive order.
N. Rodgers: Give me my pen. Where's my pen? Somebody bring me 74 pens. I need to sign an executive order.
J. Aughenbaugh: This executive order 5398. The Veterans Bureau was now elevated as an agency that reported directly to the White House and the name changed. This is where we get the Veterans Administration, the VA.
N. Rodgers: That's what I've always known it as, the VA.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: That is how it was referred to by members of my family who served in the military and went to the VA for treatments or medical, whatever. They'd say, I got to go over to the VA. In most towns, you would have a Vet, well, not most towns, big towns, big cities. We'd have a Veterans hospital and that's how people referred to it. They all had names. They were named after, many times, important people.
J. Aughenbaugh: Where you have various generals, etc.
N. Rodgers: Walter Reed or McGuire here in Richmond. People locally colloquially said, I'm going down to the VA and everybody knew what they meant.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Again, listeners, a little bit of public disclosure. Both Nia and I come from families with a long history of men and women serving in our country's military. In fact, as some of the older members of my family have ruefully remarked, my generation is probably the first that has not.
N. Rodgers: My brother served in the Air Force, so my generation is covered by my brother, thanks. But it'll be the next generation in our family. But, it's a common thing, especially for certain socioeconomic classes. My folks both poor. I think your family came from poor folks. Poor folks tend to serve in the military because it gets you out of that poverty level often. You get to see the world. In some cases, you get to go to other countries or whatever. But there's reasons to join the military that have a lot to do with and what you're about to talk about, which is the biggest reason why a lot of people modernly joined the military.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's the GI Bill. After World War II, Congress passed the GI Bill. That makes reference to the fact that many who served in the military were referred to as GIs. Nia is looking up what GI.
N. Rodgers: I was going to say what GI stands for. Isn't that terrible?
J. Aughenbaugh: What does GI?
N. Rodgers: Wikipedia has failed me.
J. Aughenbaugh: Oh no.
N. Rodgers: I know. That's terrible. You keep going and we'll come back to it.
J. Aughenbaugh: The GI Bill was signed in June of 1944 as World War II was coming to a close. It had a wide array of Veterans' benefits. For the GI Bill, you had educational benefits. Go ahead Nia
N. Rodgers: Galvanized iron. Primary material used to make military items?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: It also took on different meanings, government issue, general issue, and ground infantry.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: But I like that it started with galvanized iron.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That's cool.
J. Aughenbaugh: I always refer to it as the government issue. Because many members of the military say that when the United States or any nation's about ready to commence a war, they count their troops like they count the equipment, the uniforms. They become government issue just like the boots, the helmets, the weapons, the ready-to-eat meals.
N. Rodgers: MREs, meals ready to eat.
J. Aughenbaugh: Etc.
N. Rodgers: You haven't lived until you've had to live off of MREs for a few days.
J. Aughenbaugh: But what was really noteworthy about the GI Bill was in entire generation of Americans, the so-called Greatest Generation, we see this huge uptick in college enrollment because of the GI Bill.
N. Rodgers: Home purchasing and college enrollment.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. If you were struggling to find a job. There was a set-aside unemployment benefits program for returning Vets.
N. Rodgers: Again, we must recognize for white returning Vets.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: The black returning Vets were not eligible for the GI Bill for whatever reason it's not written into law that way. But they were denied regularly in the same way as redlining denied folks.
J. Aughenbaugh: You had administrators who thought that if you were a returning Vet and you're African-American and you couldn't find a job, then it had to be because you were lazy.
J. Aughenbaugh: What do you mean you want to purchase a home?
N. Rodgers: Well, why on earth would you want to go to college? At the time, the racism, it seemed that black folks would not want to go to college.
J. Aughenbaugh: There were reports that there was not only racial, but economic bias, in the first years of administering the GI program. You're poor white. You can't be smart enough to go to college.
N. Rodgers: I didn't realize that, but it's also a problem with it. It's a great thing and it basically was huge, in the sense that you have all these men coming back from war and it changes the American existence. That's when you get the advent of suburbs and you get the advent of the American dream. You will go to college. You will own a house. You will have 2.4 children. You will have 1.4 cats. You will have all these things.
J. Aughenbaugh: You'll have a car in your driveway and etc.
N. Rodgers: White picket fence.
J. Aughenbaugh: The logic was, this is what the country owed to what we now call the greatest generation. The United States save the world from Naziism, fascism, Japanese imperialism. Post-World War II, we get the Korean War in the late '40s, the first couple of years of the 1950s. Then we get the Vietnam War in the mid to late 1960s through the early part of the 1970s. But one of the most significant changes with those two wars was how much medical science improved, if you will, the conversion of battlefield deaths to injuries.
N. Rodgers: Right, because techniques had gotten better for saving people's lives. By the late '60s, you have things as big as transplants, heart transplants, and lung transplants. But on the battlefield, you have.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, even before that. I like where you're going because a few moments ago, you mentioned a TV show, MASH, mobile army surgical hospitals.
N. Rodgers: Right
J. Aughenbaugh: You see those used with the Korean War. You had these mobile hospitals usually set up within miles of the battlefield front. Whereas a lot of soldiers who would die because of their wounds, if they could get to the hospital, their rate of living went up dramatically.
N. Rodgers: Their survival rate goes up. In part because of proximity, but in part too because of advances in medicine, the ability to try often and treat infection and do all that thing and amputate in ways that people survived because we've always had amputations. Egyptians had amputations. But it's only in the modern era that people survive amputations as well as they do. If you survived one before that, it's because you were lucky. But they start to be a regularly survivable thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: You now have Vets who we might have lost to death, now returning home. Many of them returned home physically intact, but mentally and emotionally not or if they did return home, they were physically damaged. What do you do with this increased percentage, Nia, of all these returning Vets?
N. Rodgers: We need a bigger boat.
J. Aughenbaugh: We need a bigger boat. And what you see in the classic, if you will, American group politics, pluralism, lobbying, it took a couple of decades. But advocates for Vets finally convinced the United States Congress and the Reagan administration to create the Department of Veterans Affairs. We get that, it commenced operation in 1989. Now, the VA organizationally is split into three large units. You have VA Health Administration. This goes as far back as post-Civil War, Nia, what you described. The post-Civil War Veterans homes, and that's what they were called, Veterans homes.
N. Rodgers: It is what they were called.
J. Aughenbaugh: To the post-war World War I hospitals. It is the largest of the three units. The second, Benefits Administration. This has the longest history. Because remember listeners, when we started this podcast episode, Congress created benefits programs for even dependents and spouses of those lost in a war.
N. Rodgers: In the Revolution.
J. Aughenbaugh: In the Revolution.
N. Rodgers: This goes all the way back.
J. Aughenbaugh: But then the third, and again, this is one of those things that I came across as I was doing my research. It was just like, of course that makes sense. But I didn't know it. The Department of Veterans Affairs, and I'm just going to use the shorthand for the rest of this episode, the VA actually runs our national cemeteries.
N. Rodgers: When I read that in your notes, I was surprised. I have to say, it's because I was assuming interior. For some reason I was assuming interior.
J. Aughenbaugh: I thought the Department of Defense.
N. Rodgers: Okay. I was thinking of it in terms of park, grasslands. Because frankly, cemeteries are grassland with persons buried beneath and stones.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: I assumed interior, but it makes sense for it to be under Veterans because that's what national cemeteries hold. They hold Veterans. You have to have served in order to be buried in a National Cemetery.
J. Aughenbaugh: National Cemetery, yes.
N. Rodgers: Arlington is probably the best known.
J. Aughenbaugh: Known, yes.
N. Rodgers: But we have several in the nation where if you have served, you can be buried there with honors, what they call with honors, which is the whole military guard comes out and everything's done in very formal fashion. Yeah, it didn't even occur to me and I was like, well, yeah, okay. Now that I think about it that makes sense that that would be from the time you start your service to the time you pass, theoretically, the Veterans Affairs, the VA would take care of you in some way. Benefits and the medical and then when you pass, your final resting place.
J. Aughenbaugh: Movie reference listeners, I believe it was made in the 1980s, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. I think it as James Earl Jones and James Caan, Gardens of Stone. You might want to give it a viewing because it actually does talk about some of the politics that goes into where a Veteran is able to call their final resting place. But nevertheless.
N. Rodgers: Last full measure of devotion.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. But the creation of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Nia.
N. Rodgers: Is the word you're looking for fraught?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Has it been fraught?
J. Aughenbaugh: You would be hard-pressed, Nia, to find anybody who has studied this department that has very many good things to say about it. Almost all of the analysis is negative. There is a lot of criticism of the VA.
N. Rodgers: Well, and the thing is there's a lot of criticism of the first two parts. There's not a lot of criticism of the cemetery part. They seem to get the cemetery part right.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: But then when you talk about the health care, boy, is just a complicated set of problems, underfunding.
J. Aughenbaugh: The VA categorizes, Nia, Veterans into eight priority groups. Then underneath they have subgroups that get less priority. They categorize Vets based on factors like service related disabilities, what your income is, what your assets are, etc. That's somewhat controversial because why are we basing treatment care on whether or not when you came back, you were able to find a good job with good health insurance etc.? Shouldn't there be a baseline or a modicum of care that we will promise to all of our Veterans?
N. Rodgers: Regardless of their specific economic status.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. But to do that would require a significant increase in Congressional appropriations for the VA.
N. Rodgers: What irritates me, I'm sorry, can we get into things that irritate Nia?
J. Aughenbaugh: Sure.
N. Rodgers: I've held back for half an hour, come on now.
J. Aughenbaugh: Let me know all of our podcast episodes. I think long-term listeners can go ahead and say. This is the point where, Aughie plays devil's advocate, or this is the part of this particular episode where Nia goes ahead and shares something that bothers her.
N. Rodgers: Yes, that is what I'm going to do now, which is I think that it is, I understand actuarial tables from an intellectual point of view, but saying one person's injury in a war is worse than another person's injury in a war seems wrong to me. It seems wrong to me to decide that if you lose a limb in a battle, that you're more injured or less injured than a person who struggles with PTSD after the battle. All of those people need help and they wait years and years and years to get help. There are people who die on those lists because they're not being seen because we're not putting enough money into managing the health care of our Veterans. I'm going to not curse here. We even need to poop or get off this pot. It's very frustrating.
J. Aughenbaugh: Either we make the commitment and follow through on the commitment or.
N. Rodgers: Or we cut them loose.
J. Aughenbaugh: We just go ahead and say, we're no longer making this commitment.
N. Rodgers: Thanks for your service. Good luck. Bye.
J. Aughenbaugh: But to Nia's point, in this cuts across presidential administrations but we saw this particularly with the Bush 43 and Obama administrations. Nia, you just gave the example of Veterans who were on wait lists to get treatment, and so much of it is based on the bureaucracy of the VA, and there were delays.
N. Rodgers: You mentioned Bush and Obama. Is that the war on terror? Is that what's causing that delay?
J. Aughenbaugh: This is a huge issue, again because of improvements in medical science. Our survivor rate far surpasses most nation-states who participate in wars. We have got really effective, we do a really good job in treating battlefield injuries, wounds, etc.
N. Rodgers: Which is why when you see reports from World War I, World War II, Vietnam, the death reports come in the thousands, and when you see them in Afghanistan and Iraq, they come in the dozens. They're significantly lower death reports but now that doesn't mean they're not significantly lower injury reports.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: Percentage-wise I think people are still getting injured at pretty similar rates.
J. Aughenbaugh: They're coming home and they need treatment and care. If we've made that obligation, we need to devote more money. This is another criticism. The VA's budget basically has been pushed to the limit because of the Global War on Terrorism. This has been ongoing. The first Government Accountability Office report that I saw highlight this was in 2004. That's two years into the Global War on Terrorism, which officially did not end until which presidential administration Nia?
N. Rodgers: Biden. The infamous withdrawal from Afghanistan, which we will someday do an episode on.
J. Aughenbaugh: We're two years into a 20-year war, and Congress' Accounting and Audit Agency has already identified that the VA budget is not large enough to go ahead and deal with what it was already projecting to be a huge increase in the amount of care and treatment the current war was going to impose on the VA.
N. Rodgers: Then there's the gap period. There's that weird period where you're serving in the active military and in the active military, you have military medical facilities that care for you, but then when you no longer are active duty, for whatever reason, you either retire or you are honorably discharged.
J. Aughenbaugh: You served your two or four-year hitch, you get out.
N. Rodgers: You have this break between then and when you get because of that lag, that lag time that they talk about, there's this weird break where you don't have any kind of insurance, you don't have any kind of medical care and then you get to go to the VA. That's part of what Aughie and I were talking about when we're talking about being on waiting lists. Is those guys coming out of the military say, I'm going to get on the list for my local hospital to see me for my fill in the blank thing that I need to be seen for, and they're like, yeah, our waiting list is three years long.
J. Aughenbaugh: I just have one example in the notes. When the Global War on Terrorism started in 2001, or even before that because the Global War on Terrorism really ramped up in 2002. Before the Global War on Terrorism started, the VA already had a backlog of disability claims of over 420,000 a year. They made an effort to reduce the backlog in 2003 and got it down to roughly a quarter of a million. But then it jacked back up in 2005 to about 340,000 disability claims. While the claim is being processed you're a Veteran and you're not receiving what?
N. Rodgers: Care
J. Aughenbaugh: Care. A Brown University study that was done in 2011 predicts that we won't see the peak of Global War on Terrorism disability claims for 30 to 40 years after combat operations. Again the lag here is it's the Veterans as they get older.
N. Rodgers: Because I did not even process that in your notes immediately until you were just saying it. If a man or woman, sorry. Now both gender serve. If folks are serving in the military and let's say they get out when they're 30, it's going to be when they're 60-65 that they start to have serious illnesses as you get older because that's just how getting older works. Starting to be in your 60s, 70s, and 80s is when you start to have a failure of your body where you need more medical care than you do when you're 20, hence, why your insurance rates are lower when you're 20 than they are when you're 60.
J. Aughenbaugh: The chronic condition you may have come home with from a war becomes extremely difficult to treat as your body begins to fail. That would happen as Nia as you just explained but if the chronic condition arose when you were in the military. This becomes a point of contention. When did the condition arise and what was the cause?
N. Rodgers: Yeah. That's another thing that irritates me. This idea of pre-existing conditions and they're going to fight about whether the smoke of the burning fires in Afghanistan caused you to have lung issues or not. We know that that was disgusting and terrible for people then we know it made them sick. Why are we fighting this? Why are we not just treating these people as much as we are able? That's irritates me because that's also the 911 argument for firefighters for years was, they went down there voluntarily. Did they, the nation expected
J. Aughenbaugh: Or some of them were smokers.
N. Rodgers: Did they have family histories? Blah blah blah, for crying out loud just pay for people's medical care. If medical care is too expensive address that. Congress, I'm looking at you.
J. Aughenbaugh: What's even more frustrating to me is nobody can agree on how to fix the problems. I read over two dozen reports, Nia, and none of them can agree.
N. Rodgers: Of course, they can't
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm just like on one hand, I want to blame Congress, which I know is too easy but in this particular situation, you've created a department. You've signaled to all of our Vets, we're going to make this commitment to you and then you're grossly underfunded.You've allowed the system to be created bureaucratically. That is cold, insensitive and with all the delays typically means that we have hundreds of thousands of Vets who don't get their treatment. But that at the same time, what should Congress do to fix it?
N. Rodgers: They have to throw more money at the problem.
J. Aughenbaugh: We throw more money at it. Where do we throw the money?
N. Rodgers: I'm assuming what we have to do is hire more medical personnel and have more medical facilities. But I don't [inaudible].
J. Aughenbaugh: But the government doesn't pay them enough to attract the best talent who otherwise will work in the private sector instead of the public sector. You're going to have to raise the salaries that you go ahead and pay for the best and brightest. We know this historically the government struggles with that. But you can't do this on the cheap folks?
N. Rodgers: You can't. The problem with waiting, not only is it horrible for the Veterans.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's terrible.
N. Rodgers: But it will cost more because they will get sicker in the meantime.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Then if you had gotten it earlier. If you get to something earlier, if you get to a cancer in stage one, it will cost you significantly less to fix it than if you get to a cancer in stage three. It just does.
J. Aughenbaugh: That was the logic of the Affordable Care Act by giving Americans without health insurance a way to pay for medical care. They won't wait until it's a catastrophic health condition, they get to treat it.
N. Rodgers: Exactly. They will go go see the doctor rather than go to the ER.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: Those things cost very different amounts of money.
J. Aughenbaugh: If you go on an annual basis, you might catch something at it's earliest stage instead of when it's at its end stage and at that point, you're then throwing, excuse the football metaphor, Hail Mary's in an attempt to go ahead and save somebody's life and Hail Mary's cost a lot and they oftentimes aren't successful. If you're looking at the bottom line of did we do something to go ahead and treat and save this Vet? Well, if you're throwing Hail Mary's is success ratio is terrible.
N. Rodgers: That's usually an interception.
J. Aughenbaugh: The team that's thrown the Hail Mary usually has absolutely no realistic hope of a play succeeding.
N. Rodgers: They're just trying the best they can. The other thing is the torture that you put somebody through.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: What you're saying to Veterans is hanging on to next year and they're like, yeah, no, see, I have cancer. I may not have till next year. There's this really I don't know. It seems like a weird thing for us to ask people to serve and then not have a plan for how we're going to handle their medical issues afterwards and part of it is that we're just not, we just really are literally not supporting it financially. Here's what I propose. I propose and I know this was probably in one of the more than two dozen reports you read. I propose that we take some of the Department of Defense's budget and put it with the Department of Veterans Affairs.
J. Aughenbaugh: That was actually recommended in a number of the reports.
N. Rodgers: Because if you're going to make war to make Veterans, then some of that cost should be covered under what you would normally have given, and we also frankly spend significant amount of money on defense compared to our next what, twelve neighbor countries? It's more than the next 12 combined or something like that. It's a large amount.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, if you compare the defense spending of the other member nations of NATO to what the United States spends on defense, we spend more than all of the other nations of NATO.
N. Rodgers: The chances of us being invaded are very slim.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. What from Canada or Mexico? Are you kidding me?
N. Rodgers: Or Cuba. That's it. Those are our three closest unlikely, let's say unlikely.
J. Aughenbaugh: For listeners who were like, Nia and Aughie are anti-Department of Defense, we're not.
N. Rodgers: No, I think we need a good solid defense, I don t think we need to over defense, which I suspect is what we have right now.
J. Aughenbaugh: For me, the issue is if you make the commitment, and Nia and I are old enough to remember when the United States Congress and the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations unveiled the Department of Veterans Affairs with great fanfare. We are making a commitment to our Vets.
N. Rodgers: Well, hugely important to the senior because he had been.
J. Aughenbaugh: He had been shot down in World War II.
N. Rodgers: He knew those men, he had led men in war, he had lost men in war.
J. Aughenbaugh: But if you're going to make the commitment, you got to deliver on the commitment.
N. Rodgers: This goes to a larger question in our country with social safety nets and not funding them in ways that get the best results out of them.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, because if you're going to go ahead, for instance, create a breakfast program for kids to do well in school, you can't use that budget as a political football because once you get a generation of kids used to being able to go to school and get a good meal.
N. Rodgers: You don't get to say we're not funding that this time until you give me x. No, that's children's breakfast, what's wrong with you?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, and of all the programs that we can go ahead and use as political leverage, I think as a society, looks terrible, it is terrible. When we go ahead and say to a whole bunch of young men and women, we want you to potentially give your life for your country, but if you somehow survive, we're going to treat you like garbage when you return. I'm sorry. I don't care if you're Democrat, Republican, non-political, any nation that does that, shame on you. I know that's not civil discourse per se.
N. Rodgers: But going to the uncivil in this moment. Exactly.
J. Aughenbaugh: Shame on us.
N. Rodgers: Well, and how many Veterans could we treat for the cost of an air carrier we don't need?
J. Aughenbaugh: Or a new weapon system that may not work.
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm all in favor of funding a whole bunch of scientists who learned how to go ahead and make some really cool stuff, fly faster undetected, deliver a mega tone, blah, blah, blah. Fine. You and I both have a whole bunch of scientists friends at a university and that's great.
N. Rodgers: We support that work but by the same token for 10 of those, how many Veterans could we treat?
J. Aughenbaugh: Making somebody who's got lung disease because they were stationed somewhere in the Middle East where they were burning whatever, excuse me, that's unconscionable. I'm sorry. We have a Vet that comes home and he gets addicted to painkillers, we don't go ahead and quibble with their paperwork. We get them into an addiction program so that they can actually have some semblance of a life.
N. Rodgers: Otherwise, our other choice is to hire that stuff out to mercenaries and make it somebody else's problem.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: If we want to do that in this country, then we need a budget for doing that. We need to budget to say, we're going to pay folks like Blackwater and it's up to them to give their employees insurance and health care and all that other stuff.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: But we have decided we don't want to do that because we don't want mercenary force. Then we have to take the responsibility ourselves. That's the only two choices here, but what we do want to say to wrap up this episode is thank you to our Veterans. Thank you to the men and women who serve this country, we appreciate that you're fighting so that a lot of us don't have to and that you're fighting for things like democracy or safety in the world and we are grateful for that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, sincere gratitude because what you experienced allows folks like Nia and I once a week to go ahead in our company environments, to go ahead and discuss political issues and that's not lost on either one of us
N. Rodgers: You buy our freedom of speech with your blood and we are grateful for it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Sincerely.
N. Rodgers: Thank you, Aughie and I guess next time we talk about DHS.
J. Aughenbaugh: Department of Homeland Security, which Nia and I have a little bit of background in.
N. Rodgers: I'm just a snitch, we're going to have to be careful that that episode doesn't go eight hours.
J. Aughenbaugh: Thank you Nia.
N. Rodgers: Thank you Aughie.
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