DOD watchdog report warns of issues across military health care system

I wish my issues were just for retirees but active duty is the same and we are apilot training base. Nothing but the best for americas finest.

The year I retired from the AF Lt Col Scott Shuttleworth, Tricare became the norm. I refused to pay for a medical insurance that required me to see a gatekeeper before seeing a specialist.
Instead, I chose Tricare standard which didn’t cost anything and paid for a real medical plan through my wife’s school board. As an advanced practice nurse, I know who I need to see, I don’t need a gatekeeper to make that decision.
When I turned 65 I went on TriCare for Life. A year later my wife did too, as they got ready to change the Tricare for Life the next year.
I watched how bad the Tricare gatekeeper system was when one of my soccer player blew out his ACL at practice. I told his dad when they saw the military gatekeeper to see his credentials as an orthopedic surgeon. Since he couldn’t produce them then asks for an orthopedic appointment with a civilian ortho doc. He didn’t follow my advice. It took two months of physical therapy failure for the physical therapist to confront the doctor and to tell him the ACL was torn and to send him to an orthopedic surgeon.
Three months after the accident, I did his anesthesia at the local hospital. He was finally allowed to play high school soccer three games into the season.

Maj Robert Thornton - I will say this...when I see a doc on base and ask for a referral there have been no issues...they shoot it through immediately and I get seen...I am with you on it though when I see a doc downtown and they say I need a specialist why do I have to see a doc on base to verify what another MD has already stated. TY pical military two step.

CPL LaForest Gray thanks for the FACTS.

*GOP's actual track record on supporting veterans
Oct 23, 2013 1:43pm EDT by JLFinch, Community

SOURCE : https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2013/10/23/1249904/-GOP-s-actual-track-record-on-supporting-veterans


1.) These 41 Senate Republicans Voted Against Veterans' Healthcare—Full List

“bill aimed at protecting veterans exposed to toxic materials during their service was shut down yesterday in the Senate, in a 55 to 42 vote that failed to meet the 60-vote threshold necessary to advance the legislation.”

SOURCE : https://www.newsweek.com/41-senate-republicans-voted-against-veterans-health-care-1728613?amp=1


2.) The Party of Veterans: Democrats or Republicans?

In her new book, "Congress and U.S. Veterans: From the GI Bill to the VA Crisis," Stevens Assistant Professor Lindsey Cormack evaluates how the parties legislate and communicate veterans' policies.

SOURCE : https://www.stevens.edu/news/party-veterans-democrats-or-republicans


3.) Born of Controversy: The GI Bill of Rights

“It has been heralded as one of the most significant pieces of legislation ever produced by the federal government—one that impacted the United States socially, economically and politically. But it almost never came to pass.

The Servicemembers' Readjustment Act of 1944—commonly known as the GI Bill of Rights—nearly stalled in Congress as members of the House and Senate debated provisions of the controversial bill.

Some shunned the idea of paying unemployed veterans $20 a week because they thought it diminished their incentive to look for work. Others questioned the concept of sending battle-hardened veterans to colleges and universities, a privilege then reserved for the rich.
Despite their differences, all agreed something must be done to help veterans assimilate into civilian life.

SOURCE : https://www.va.gov/opa/publications/celebrate/gi-bill.pdf

Lt Col Scott Shuttleworth

https://youtu.be/T0cgc3p--VU?si=kIKwAcOZroLwN-Ps

1.) How One Conservative Think Tank Is Stocking Trump’s Government

By placing its people throughout the administration, the Heritage Foundation has succeeded in furthering its right-wing agenda.

The Trump team may not have been prepared to staff the government, but the Heritage Foundation was. In the summer of 2014, a year before Trump even declared his candidacy, the right-wing think tank had started assembling a 3,000-name searchable database of trusted movement conservatives from around the country who were eager to serve in a post-Obama government. The initiative was called the Project to Restore America, a dog-whistle appeal to the so-called silent majority that foreshadowed Trump’s own campaign slogan.

Today it is clear that for all the chaos and churn of the current administration, Heritage has achieved a huge strategic victory. Those who worked on the project estimate that hundreds of the people the think tank put forward landed jobs, in just about every government agency. Heritage’s recommendations included some of the most prominent members of Trump’s cabinet: Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos (whose in-laws endowed Heritage’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society), Mick Mulvaney, Rick Perry, Jeff Sessions and many more. Dozens of Heritage employees and alumni also joined the Trump administration — at last count 66 of them, according to Heritage, with two more still awaiting Senate confirmation. It is a kind of critical mass that Heritage had been working toward for nearly a half-century.

Feulner saw something in Reagan long before he became president. “We had met with him when he was governor in California; we had visited his ranch and seen copies of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek with marginal notes in the book,” Feulner told me. “So we knew that he was one of us.” In the run-up to the 1980 election, Heritage spent $250,000 to assemble a comprehensive guidebook for conservative rule that it called “Mandate for Leadership” and aggressively marketed it to members of Reagan’s transition team, in particular Edwin Meese, who was Reagan’s chief of staff in California and later became his attorney general in Washington.

The big gamble paid off: Meese told me that Reagan asked that the 1,093-page document be distributed at his first cabinet meeting. Reagan also turned to Heritage and Feulner to help staff and organize his administration. An enduring, mutually beneficial friendship was born. Meese wrote a letter on White House stationery stating that members of Heritage’s President’s Club — at the time, donors of $1,000 or more — would “provide a vital communications link between policymakers and those key people who made possible Reagan’s victory,” as Sidney Blumenthal reported in his 1986 book “The Rise of the Counter-Establishment.”

The relationship worked both ways. When Reagan’s second term ended, Meese joined Heritage as its first Ronald Reagan Fellow in Public Policy, with an annual salary of more than $400,000. Now 86, he remains at the think tank as distinguished fellow emeritus of the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.

Over the following decades, Feulner continued to pursue his dream of turning the counterestablishment into the establishment. The prospects had perhaps never looked bleaker than they did in 2012, when Obama was easily elected to his second term. Having just turned 70, Feulner decided that it was time to retire. At that moment in conservative history, it was not difficult for him to see where the future of the think tank lay: the Tea Party. Heritage had helped organize and underwrite the anti-tax, anti-government — and, most of all, anti-Obama — movement, even creating a lobbying organization, Heritage Action, to help harness the energy it unleashed.

DeMint intensified the think tank’s marketing efforts, targeting Obamacare in particular. A Heritage billboard went up in Times Square — “Warning,” it read, “Obamacare may be hazardous to your health” — and DeMint led a “Defund Obamacare Tour” across the country. In Congress, he had been something of a one-man ideological enforcer. Now he had at his disposal the power of an $80 million institution whose name was a one-word shorthand for movement conservatism; the backing of some of the country’s richest, most politically engaged Republicans; and a significant slice of the conservative base. Within months of his arrival, he was pressing House Republicans to send the president a spending bill that wouldn’t fund the Affordable Care Act, thus inviting a government shutdown. “There’s no question in my mind that I have more influence now on public policy than I did as an individual senator,” he said in an interview with National Public Radio in 2013.

Churn is a central feature of this administration, even for its unofficial staffing agency. Paul Winfree, a Heritage economist who helped draft Trump’s first budget, is back at the think tank. So are Stephen Moore, who worked on the Trump tax cuts; David Kreutzer, who played a key role in dissolving a White House working group that was studying the monetary costs associated with climate-warming carbon dioxide; and Hans von Spakovsky, who helped run the now-defunct voter-fraud commission, which was created to find evidence to support Trump’s baseless claim that millions of people voted illegally for Hillary Clinton.

SOURCE : https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/magazine/trump-government-heritage-foundation-think-tank.html


There’s more insecure white racist nationalists groups/organization’s than just Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation ( No refuge, white racist nationalist will no longer have anonymity to remain anonymous )

2.) The Claremont Institute: The Anti-Democracy Think Tank

It was once (mostly) traditionally conservative and (sort of) intellectually rigorous. Now it platforms white nationalists and promotes authoritarianism.

August 10, 2023

NatCon conferences, as they are often called, have been held in Italy, Belgium, and Florida and are broadly associated with what is increasingly called the “New Right.” In London, speakers denounced “woke politics,” blamed immigration for the rising cost of housing, and said modern ills could be solved with more religion and more (nonimmigrant) babies.

The break room was lined with booths from organizations such as the Viktor Orban–affiliated Danube Institute, the U.K.-based conservative think tank the Bow Group, the Heritage Foundation, and the legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom, which is headquartered in Arizona but has expanded to include offices in nearly a half-dozen European cities.

When I attended NatCon London in May, I heard a number of American accents in the crowd, and I was not surprised to see Michael Anton, a former national security official in the Trump administration and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank, on the lineup. These days, Anton and other key representatives of the Claremont Institute seem to be everywhere: onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC); at the epicenter of Ron DeSantis’s “war on woke”; and on speed-dial with GOP allies including Josh Hawley, J.D. Vance, and Donald Trump.

Most of us are familiar with the theocrats of the religious right and the anti-government extremists, groups that overlap a bit but remain distinct. The Claremont Institute folks aren’t quite either of those things, and yet they’re both and more. In embodying a kind of nihilistic yearning to destroy modernity, they have become an indispensable part of right-wing America’s evolution toward authoritarianism.

Extremism of the right-wing variety has always figured on the sidelines of American culture, and it has enjoyed a renaissance with the rise of social media. But Claremont represents something new in modern American politics: a group of people, not internet conspiracy freaks but credentialed and influential leaders, who are openly contemptuous of democracy. And they stand a reasonable chance of being seated at the highest levels of government—at the right hand of a President Trump or a President DeSantis, for example.

There is a story you hear from the podiums at gatherings like NatCon and CPAC, and if you go to enough of them, it will sound as familiar as a classic rock song. It goes something like this: The sum of all our problems—and the greatest threat that the American republic has ever faced—is the rise of the “woke” elite. Cosmopolitan, overeducated, gender-fluid, parasitic, and anti-Christian—the leaders of this progressive cabal worship at the shrine of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices, which they use to elevate undeserving people of color and crush hardworking “real” Americans.

They control “the regime,” or so the song tells us: “the administrative state,” the institutions of culture, law enforcement, even the military.

Any and all means to annihilate the power of the woke, up to and including political violence and overturning elections, must be seriously considered if we (right-thinking Americans) are to “save our country.”

It’s not just the NatCon types who are humming this tune; it has permeated other sectors of the American right. In the run-up to the 2023 Road to Majority Policy Conference, an annual gathering of religious right activists, strategists, and politicians that took place in Washington, D.C., in June, seasoned Christian right strategist Ralph Reed sent out a fundraising email asserting, “Woke culture and anti-Christian, anti-American radicals drive our public life further and further from the Light of God’s Word.” From the main stage of the conference, Ron DeSantis railed against the “woke mind virus”; Vivek Ramaswamy took a swipe at the “administrative state”; and Josh Hawley asserted that “woke corporations” and “Marxists in the C-suite” are “pushing relentlessly this Marxist agenda, pushing relentlessly this religion of woke.” At the gala dinner, Trump delivered a rambling attack on his political opponents in the Democratic Party, whom he accused of “trying to impose their blasphemous creed of woke communism.”

SOURCE : https://newrepublic.com/article/174656/claremont-institute-think-tank-trump


*** Disclaimer : This a repost from myself, because people are tooooo comfortable with the status quo. ***

“I will not apologize for telling the FACTS, in a world that worship the lies”.

* They’ve been actively working against the American People and for the large corporations and rich.

Before you chime in and snub your nose, have INTEGRITY with yourself if you ACTUALLY befitting from :

The Heritage Foundation's "After Obamacare Repeal" Plan

This page covering a proposed federal healthcare bill was last updated in 2017. If you would like to help our coverage grow, consider donating to Ballotpedia. Please contact us with any updates.

After Obamacare Repeal is a healthcare plan released by The Heritage Foundation in October 2013. The plan would primarily provide consumers with tax credits to purchase insurance and encourage the use of health savings accounts.

Employer-sponsored insurance would also be amended ending the federal tax deduction for health benefits. The Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, would be repealed in its entirety.

* HIGHLIGHTS

Under the proposal, employers would offer their employees a cash contribution to purchase their own insurance, rather than providing health plans directly.
In place of the prohibition on denying coverage for preexisting conditions, the plan supports either state-operated high-risk pools or state reinsurance programs that would reimburse insurers for the cost of covering individuals with complex or expensive conditions.

Federal Medicaid funds would be distributed to states either through block grants or a per-capita allotment, rather than as a matching percentage of state funds.

The Heritage Foundation public official program/plan to continue to hurt the American people and this is the same group that is publicly funding those GOP/REPUBLICANS that in 2023’ want to gut/defund/eradicate Social Security starting day one of the first 180 of the new GOP Commander In Chief.

—

The following is summary text from The Heritage Foundation's After Obamacare Repeal plan

allow Americans to reclaim control of their own health care and benefit from competition in a free market for insurance and health care, Congress should repeal the Obamacare statute and enact patient-centered, market-based reforms based on five principles:
• Choose, control, and carry your own health insurance;
• Let free markets provide the insurance and health care services that people want;
• Encourage employers to provide a portable health insurance benefit to employees;
• Assist those who need help through civil society, the free market, and the states; and
• Protect the right of conscience and unborn children.[1] ”
—The Heritage Foundation[2]

The Heritage Foundation's After Obamacare Repeal would repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in its entirety. The plan also proposes ending the federal tax deduction for health benefits offered by employers and instead offering all individuals a tax credit to purchase health insurance on their own. The plan would also support offering each American a standard tax deduction for health insurance as an alternative to tax credits.[3] Under the proposal, employers would offer their employees a cash contribution to purchase their own insurance, rather than providing health plans directly

* After Obamacare Repeal would also encourage the use of health savings accounts (HSAs) by removing the restriction on using HSA funds for health insurance premiums and by raising the limit on the amount of money an individual may deposit into the account each year. In place of the prohibition on denying coverage for preexisting conditions, the plan supports either state-operated high-risk pools or state reinsurance programs that would reimburse insurers for the cost of covering individuals with complex or expensive conditions.[2]

* With the goal of increasing competition, the proposal would remove federal barriers to selling insurance plans across state lines. Under the plan, small businesses and individuals could pool together for the purpose of purchasing insurance, and religious groups and fraternal organizations could offer insurance plans to their members.[2]

* After Obamacare Repeal would also make changes to Medicaid and Medicare. The proposal would encourage states to provide low-income Medicaid beneficiaries with cash assistance to purchase private health plans. Federal Medicaid funds would be distributed to states either through block grants or a per-capita allotment, rather than as a matching percentage of state funds. The Medicare program would be altered by allowing doctors and patients to "[contract] privately for medical services outside of traditional Medicare." The plan also supports providing Medicare enrollees with a subsidy to purchase a health plan of their choice.[2

SOURCE : https://ballotpedia.org/The_Heritage_Foundation%27s_%22After_Obamacare_Repeal%22_Plan

Lt Col Scott Shuttleworth

1.) Ignored Warnings Left the Military Health System Unprepared
May 11, 2020

“The public show of military doctors aiding in the coronavirus response belies the fact that the military health system lacks the ability to handle even the routine health needs of the services during normal conditions.”

The public show of military doctors aiding in the coronavirus response belies the fact that the military health system lacks the ability to handle even the routine health needs of the services during normal conditions.

A Defense Department Inspector General investigation found, for example, that because of a shortage of doctors, the Langley Air Force hospital in Virginia had only one provider for every 1,600 patients even though regulations require there be only 1,250 patients per provider—a regulation that still leaves a burdensome caseload.

These shortages, the inspector general found, meant patients “may have been at risk of increased health complications due to longer wait times.”

As will be discussed below, those shortages are due in large part to placing a much higher priority on spending for pet weapons programs. Evidence of this can be seen in the service’s most recent so-called unfunded priorities list, through which services try to get money for programs that were not included in the department’s regular annual budget request.

The Navy did request $11.6 million to upgrade the USNS Mercy hospital ship, but that was the only health care related request on any of the service’s wish lists. They devoted the rest of their $5.42 billion request to things like a submarine, F-35s, and missiles.

The Army is requesting over $7 billion, more than half of which is meant to pay for current overseas operations. Of what remains, the Army has earmarked a third to purchase helicopters, armored vehicles, and simulators. The rest is to build barracks and childcare centers, and to pay for building renovations. None goes to health care.

The Air Force similarly did not request additional funds for health care. Unless quick action is taken, the services may not have enough doctors and nurses to respond to either a domestic crisis or battlefield needs when the nation goes to war.

The nation has already seen a preview of the coming crisis in military medicine when the Army had to reach out to retired military doctors and medics to return to service as part of a voluntary recall to help fight the coronavirus. Fortunately, many were listening because within days of notifications being sent to more than 800,000 former soldiers, approximately 25,000 volunteers stepped forward to backfill positions in military treatment facilities as troops deployed to the field hospitals now popping up in American cities to deal with patients stricken by the virus.

Undoubtedly, military leaders resorted to such measures due to the scale of the coronavirus response. But a review of government reports and medical journal articles, as well as conversations with military doctors, shows that years of reduced spending on the Defense Department’s health services, reductions to the medical corps staff, and efforts to outsource military health care to civilian hospitals strained the system long before the virus emerged and set the stage to have to resort to volunteers.

SOURCE : https://www.pogo.org/analysis/ignored-warnings-left-the-military-health-system-unprepared



2.) Barriers to Care
The Department of Defense (DOD) strives to better understand the barriers to care that service members face regarding mental health diagnoses and treatment. Seeking care early can help service members address mental health conditions before they worsen. Despite the benefits of seeking mental health care, approximately 60-70 percent of military personnel who experience mental health problems do not seek mental health services. This underutilization of services may be ascribed to many types of barriers to mental health .

SOURCE : https://www.health.mil/Military-Health-Topics/Centers-of-Excellence/Psychological-Health-Center-of-Excellence/Psychological-Health-Readiness/Barriers-to-Care



3.) Military Health
The Military Health System supports the National Defense Strategy by providing a medically ready force, a ready medical force and a medical benefit in keeping with the service and sacrifice of more than 9.6 million active-duty personnel, military retirees and their families

SOURCE : https://www.defense.gov/Spotlights/Military-Health/