JFAV UPDATES

July 01, 2014

REFORM THE DVA NOW, CHANGE OF SYSTEM THAT CARES FOR THE VETERANS AND THEIR SURVIVORS, NOT CHANGE OF PEOPLE- JFAV

Los Angeles-The Justice for Filipino American Veterans (JFAV), a national alliance of Filipino World War II veterans and their survivors, youth and students and community organizations based in the United States calls President Barack Obama plans to nominate former Procter & Gamble executive Robert McDonald as the next Veterans Affairs secretary as a useless palliative in the systemically corrupt Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA), the most corrupt government agency in the American system of government.

Like General Shinseheki, McDonald also has a military background, graduating near the top of his class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and serving as a captain in the Army, primarily in the 82nd Airborne Division. And like Shinsheki who promised to reform the graft-laden DVA,

JFAV is sure that Mcdonald or any nominee in the future will fail to reduce the 600,000 backlogged American claims and 100,000 long waiting list for current medical treatment delays and that includes the denial of 25,000 claims of Filipino World War II Veterans and 60,000 Filipina widows/survivors and the constant influx of new veterans returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere.

JFAV believes that the US Congress and the White House that seeks to shore up an agency beset by treatment delays and struggling to deal with an influx of new veterans returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan do not really understand how to solve the problem and only knows how to give money to DVA to spend but do not know how to use them expeditiously.

From One Military Bureaucrat to Another

JFAV know that McDonald resigned abruptly from Procter & Gamble in May 2013 amid pressure from investors concerned that he was not doing enough to boost the company’s performance.

The VA operates the largest integrated health care system in the country, with more than 300,000 fulltime employees and nearly 9 million veterans enrolled for care. But the agency has come under intense scrutiny in recent months amid reports of patients dying while waiting for appointments and of treatment delays in VA facilities nationwide.

Obama dispatched one of his top advisers, Rob Nabors, to the VA to help investigate agency issues and appointed Sloan Gibson as acting secretary while awaiting a permanent replacement.

DVA Systemic Problem Needs A Systemic Solution

Nabors and Gibson delivered a scathing report to Obama Friday, citing “significant and chronic system failures” in the nation’s health system. The report also portrayed the Veterans Affairs Department as a struggling agency battling a corrosive culture of distrust, lacking in resources and ill-prepared to deal with an influx of new and older veterans with a range of medical and mental needs.

Even the Chair of the Senate Veterans Committee, Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Maine) said in a statement, “The VA needs significantly improved transparency and accountability and it needs an increased number of doctors, nurses and other medical staff so that all eligible veterans get high-quality health care in a timely manner.”

JFAV believes that sweeping and immediate reforms is needed in the DVA, an increase in the number of medical staff that will treat the veterans and not the non medical and administrative personells that saddles the DVA with bureaucratic maze and let the thousands of American veterans die untreated in timely manner and not cosmetic change or change of people in the DVA.

Reform and Restructure the DVA, Now!

More Doctors and Medical Staff, not Too Much Bureaucratic Fat and Baggages.

Money for Veterans and Their Survivors, Not for War

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