We forget the disabled every minute. President Obama forgets them while addressing the troops in Afghanistan. He promises a great and noble health care system for veterans, but he knows we’ve never managed to build a sustained and sustaining health care system for soldiers. He knows. Still he sticks to what he’s supposed to say. And the troops applaud because they must. Meantime troops with disabilities are struggling all over the US. The obstacles they face are profound. My concern as a disability rights advocate rests with the fact that when we forget the plight of real wounded warriors—forget that rehabilitation and reasonable accommodations and education are necessary and should be understood as “rights”—then, in the heart of forgetting, we admit cynicism and demagoguery into the public square. This is happening today, at this very hour. We have underfunded the VA for years. Now in the wake of the VA’s “waitlist scandal” we hear a chorus of cynical voices calling for the dismantling of the VA. Tom Philpott writes about the Koch Brothers front group “Concerned Veterans for America over at Stars & Stripes:
In the thick of this is Concerned Veterans for America, posing as a vet advocacy group and being rewarded for it. CVA press releases usually are partisan attacks. Its spokesman, Pete Hegseth, an Iraq war vet and Republican who ran for a U.S. Senate in 2012, is quoted often by major news outlets without mention of press reports associating CVA with the Koch brothers, libertarian billionaires who create public interest groups to oppose big government. That’s fine. That’s protected speech. A CVA spokesman told me last year it won’t reveal donor information.
What should upset vets is the use of select facts about VA and its programs to reinforce fears rather than give reliable information. Last week a CVA press release hit a new low in purporting to document “lies” Shinseki told in congressional testimony, dropping any veil of respect for a decorated, combat-disabled soldier with a long and stellar career.
It is no coincidence only Republicans, including Rep. Jeff Miller (Fla.) and Sen. Richard Burr (N.C.), participate in CVA events. They should reconsider. Though CVA sponsors an occasional informative forum in Washington D.C., it produces no careful analyses of what ails VA. The goal seems to be to attack, relentlessly, while a Democrat holds the White House.
Traditional vet groups are alarmed by the rising profile CVA has on cable news programs and in newspapers where informed opinions on chronic claim backlogs and care delays should rule. Instead, there’s heated rhetoric that stirs dissent and attempts to turns the public against a department the CVA routinely portrays always as too costly and too ineffective.
**
The United States has been underfunding health care, mental health services, community health programs, disability rehabilitation services, and veterans health services for the better part of the past 40 years.
This is a fact. And now the Koch Brothers see their chance to take apart what is already underfunded.
Everyone should be alarmed.
Planet of the Blind 