Monday, July 09, 2012

Where do veterans stand?


Veterans and our men and women in the military will need to make some big decisions regarding which candidate they'll choose for President. They know what President Obama has done and how he has brought troops home from Iraq, and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, Republican Mitt Romney has hinted at what he'll do.  According to the Daily Beast, Romney has brought in some former VA leaders from the previous Bush administrations, including James Nicholson, "...who abruptly resigned from the VA in 2007 amid controversy...," Anthony Principi, and James Peake.

Here is more from the Daily Beast:

...No one really knows yet just how Romney will change the VA. Last fall at a Veterans Day meeting with veterans in South Carolina, he said he thought that privatizing the VA might be a good idea.
At the meeting, Romney reportedly said, “Sometimes you wonder, would there be some way to introduce some private sector competition, somebody else that could come in and say, you know, each soldier gets X-thousand dollars attributed to them and then they can choose whether they want to go on the government system or the private system and then it follows them, like what happens with schools in Florida where they have a voucher that follows them. Who knows?”

...When Nicholson resigned, Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the largest group representing veterans of America’s two post-9/11 wars, said, “The VA under Secretary Nicholson has been woefully unprepared for the influx of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, consistently underestimating the number of new veterans who would seek care, and failing to spend the money Congress allotted to treat mental-health issues.” 

The Republicans are good at giving lip service to veterans, but they continue to fail to provide the help and equipment that our vets really need.