Department of Waste & Fraud
Montel Williams on the VA:
Which means it basically operates identically to every other appendage of government, from your HOA to the EPA.
By no means am I disagreeing with him; the organization needs to be shut down or reformed, preferably via mass firings. But this administration isn't about to do that, not with a workforce participation rate persistently lower than during the Great Depression. Once again, however, I refer you to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
The VA is terrible at what it does because it's designed to be terrible at what it does. The Roman aristocrats after the Marius Reforms enticed citizens into joining the legions by promising them a thousand denarii and a large plot of arable land in exchange for 25 years of service. But the Roman ruling class weren't stupid; they knew the chances of any individual legionnaire surviving 25 years of active campaigning in the ongoing wars of expansion was quite small. Thus their actual outlay for former legionnaires was also quite small. It was a purely actuarial decision; the house always wins in the end.
The United States government is no different. After 20 years you can retire on half-pay (half of nothing, as the saying goes...) and go find yourself another career so you can work for another 30 years. The "free" medical care via the VA is exactly what you'd expect of free medical care, and that problem predates Obama by about 50 years. Moreover, the "problem" as a whole -- soldiers who refuse to die conveniently after 19-1/2 years of back-breaking, body-destroying service -- predates him by millennia.
The endemic problems with the VA are no surprise to veterans or even the grandchildren of veterans. We've been dealing with it for decades. The only thing surprising to us is the fact that everyone else took so long to notice it.
"[The Veteran's Administration is] too big and we’ve created a structure where again, if you can’t fire somebody we’ve got a problem and we’ve got a bigger problem, when a group of people can vote themselves a bonus just for keeping track of numbers that they lie about."
Which means it basically operates identically to every other appendage of government, from your HOA to the EPA.
By no means am I disagreeing with him; the organization needs to be shut down or reformed, preferably via mass firings. But this administration isn't about to do that, not with a workforce participation rate persistently lower than during the Great Depression. Once again, however, I refer you to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
The VA is terrible at what it does because it's designed to be terrible at what it does. The Roman aristocrats after the Marius Reforms enticed citizens into joining the legions by promising them a thousand denarii and a large plot of arable land in exchange for 25 years of service. But the Roman ruling class weren't stupid; they knew the chances of any individual legionnaire surviving 25 years of active campaigning in the ongoing wars of expansion was quite small. Thus their actual outlay for former legionnaires was also quite small. It was a purely actuarial decision; the house always wins in the end.
The United States government is no different. After 20 years you can retire on half-pay (half of nothing, as the saying goes...) and go find yourself another career so you can work for another 30 years. The "free" medical care via the VA is exactly what you'd expect of free medical care, and that problem predates Obama by about 50 years. Moreover, the "problem" as a whole -- soldiers who refuse to die conveniently after 19-1/2 years of back-breaking, body-destroying service -- predates him by millennia.
The endemic problems with the VA are no surprise to veterans or even the grandchildren of veterans. We've been dealing with it for decades. The only thing surprising to us is the fact that everyone else took so long to notice it.
posted by Jar(egg)head at 14:46
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