The Myopia of 'High Level Oversight Committees"
Report Says Fixes Slow To Come at Walter Reed
By Steve Vogel Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, September 27, 2007; A01
More than half a year after disclosures of systemic problems at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other military hospitals, the Pentagon's promised fixes are threatened by staff shortages and uncertainty about how best to improve long-term care for wounded troops, according to a congressional report issued yesterday.
. . . Members of the House oversight subcommittee on national security laid the blame on the Defense Department, the Army and the Department of Veterans Affairs for what Rep. John F. Tierney (D-Mass.) termed an "utter lack of urgency."
. . . A slew of commissions and task forces have agreed that at the heart of the bureaucratic maze is a system in which the military services and the VA evaluate injured service members. The often-conflicting evaluations leave many recovering soldiers in limbo for months or even years.
. . . "We're seven months into this process, and we're just now getting off the ground," Tierney said. "Why has it taken so long?" Dominguez responded that the Pentagon and the VA needed to exercise "due diligence" before plunging forward with fundamental changes. "It does take some time to develop those details," he said.
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Is it possible to even conceive of what the Pentagon exercising 'due diligence' and the Veterans Administration struggling through their own similar process and then--then, getting their collective heads together to diligence collectively?
Put these jokers in a room and don't let them out until they've done their duty to the men and women who have paid for this war with their minds and bodies.
GM, the most dog-shit of our dog-shit bureaucratic corporations banged out an agreement in three weeks with the UAW--an agreement that covered a multiplicity of complicated issues, including transfer of a $50 billion health liability.
Three weeks.
The Pentagon, which wasted no time sending these soldiers off into harms way, can't find its ass with both hands to merely decide how to treat the victims of their incompetence. If George Bush had the sense god gave a goose, he'd bring these idiots into the Oval Office, cut through all this oversight committee bullshit and break some heads.
Does anybody want to bet on how long that may take to happen?
* For more in-depth articles by Jim on Health Care, check out Opinion-Columns.com