The 66-year-old Vietnam veteran and former Green Beret had been diagnosed with a series of psychological problems stemming from his combat service, including post-traumatic stress disorder. He also suffered from advanced Parkinson’s disease.
He was plainly a very sick man. Still, when Dr. Mohit Chopra, then a geriatric psychiatrist at the veterans’ hospital in Brockton, examined Thomas P. Powers in August 2012, he was stunned at what he found.
Powers had been moved from his bed to a recliner, where he was rigidly bent forward, drooling uncontrollably, unable to communicate. His hands trembled violently. Records showed he was being administered a mix of powerful antipsychotic drugs, one of them with side effects that included tremors, also a primary symptom of Parkinson’s.
War is good for the pharmaceuticals as well as the banks, both prominently represented by my paper.
But amid thousands of notes on his case, there was not a single reference to indicate that Powers, who died last year, had ever been seen by a psychiatrist after being admitted to the long-term care unit seven years earlier.
“Not once,” said Chopra, still sounding shocked. Hospital staff had also not ordered a standard blood test for a patient in his condition taking such medications. “Something like this would be shocking if it happened in a Third World country.”
Chopra described his initial encounter with Powers in an exclusive interview with the Globe after the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal agency, confirmed Chopra’s allegations that several patients at the Brockton VA’s Community Living Center were given substandard care....
Earlier I was told great care here, only bad in Western Mass., but then lo and behold....
Concerns dismissed, VA care questions remain.
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Thankfully Congre$$ and the admini$tration are on the case:
"Obama signs law to boost veterans’ health care; Measure offers injured access to private doctors" by Matthew Daly and Darlene Superville | Associated Press August 08, 2014
FORT BELVOIR, Va. — Tens of thousands of military veterans who have been enduring long waits for medical care should be able to turn to private doctors almost immediately under a law signed Thursday by President Obama.
Other changes will take longer under the $16.3 billion law, which is the government’s most sweeping response to the problems that have rocked the Veterans Affairs Department and led to the ouster of Eric Shinseki as VA secretary.
Improved access to outside care is likely to be the most immediate effect. Veterans who have waited at least a month for a medical appointment or who live at least 40 miles from a Veterans Affairs hospital or clinic will be able to see private doctors at government expense.
Expanding the VA staff by hiring thousands of doctors, nurses, and mental health counselors — another key component of the law — will take months to get underway and years to complete, VA officials said. Opening 27 new clinics across the country will take at least two years.
I know I'm supposed to be patient and all, but I've been hearing that for years and years while the liars and looters get what they want right up front. How could things have gotten this bad?
‘‘Implementing this law will take time,’’ Obama acknowledged as he signed the bill at Fort Belvoir, an Army base in Virginia just outside Washington. Service members, veterans groups, and military leaders attended the ceremony, along with lawmakers from both parties.
I'm tired of the excuses, sir. You've had six years and it's a disaster. You broke another promise.
Obama called the legislation a rare example of Republicans and Democrats working together effectively. He also said more action was needed.
I'm sick of that $hit fooley game, too. They get the war bills through fine and anything Israel wants sails through. The partisanship is only there to stop what the American people want and need, or its a useful out to continue a $tatu$ quo $y$tem.
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Paul Rieckhoff, founder and chief executive of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, called the new law ‘‘a Band-Aid solution,’’ all that Congress could accomplish in an emergency.
Better than nothing, which is what the hungry and unemployed got.
‘‘Anybody who thinks this is going to fix the problem is not being honest about this,’’ Rieckhoff said, citing a host of issues the bill leaves unaddressed, from veterans’ suicides and homelessness to a stubborn backlog in disability claims.
Daniel Dellinger, national commander of the American Legion, the nation’s largest veterans group, called the bill an important step to begin repairing systemic problems at the VA.
‘‘But it is only one step and only a beginning,’’ he said.
The measure, approved overwhelmingly in the House and Senate, is a response to reports of veterans dying while awaiting appointments to see VA doctors and of a widespread practice of employees covering up months-long wait times for appointments. In some cases, employees received bonuses based on falsified records.
It LOOKS CRIMINAL to me, but beyond that imagine how much care could have been given instead of an effort at massive fraud to perpetuate performance bonuses, promotions, and feather nested pensions.
I love AmeriKa's war machine! All getting rich!
Under the new law, employment rules will be revised to make it easier to fire senior VA executives judged to be negligent or performing poorly.
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Veterans groups said that just as important as the new law will be the performance of new VA Secretary Robert McDonald, who was present for Thursday’s bill-signing.
The former Procter & Gamble chief executive was sworn in July 30 to lead the sprawling agency, has pledged to transform the VA, and has said improving patient access to health care is a priority, along with restoring transparency, accountability, and integrity to the agency.
He has directed VA facilities across the country to hold ‘‘town hall’’ style meetings to make sure they’re getting honest feedback from veterans, a move Obama applauded Thursday.
‘‘This is a labor of love for him, and he has hit the ground running,’’ Obama said.
McDonald travels to Phoenix on Friday to visit the VA hospital where the scandal started amid reports of secret waiting lists and patients dying while waiting for care.
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Related: VA Finally Fixed
That should just about sweep things up -- and make the scandal a nonissue during the campaign.
"Spouses of military’s fallen navigate complicated benefits system" by Thomas Gibbons-Neff | Washington Post August 09, 2014
See: Picking Up Where I Left Off
WASHINGTON — On Mother’s Day 2010, Marine Sergeant Thomas Bagosy told his wife that he loved her and that he had completed his two purposes in life: He had served his country and helped bring their children into the world.
The next day, after a battle with post-traumatic stress that spanned nearly half a decade, he put a .22 caliber pistol to his head and shot himself.
Related: Guarding Against Suicide
Those and the rapes have faded away in urgency, notice that?
Also see: Navy report faults skipper’s actions
It must have been Savage Destiny.
His wife, Katie, found out several hours later when a casualty notification officer from Camp Lejeune, N.C., pulled up to her door. In his hand: a gigantic three-ring binder with a fading American flag plastered from cover to binding and the ‘‘Widow’s Survival Handbook’’ nestled within.
‘‘He hands me this gigantic binder with ‘the days ahead’ written on the side,’’ Bagosy recalled. ‘‘It was too much to deal with.’’
After more than 13 years of war that have killed 6,808 service members, thousands of spouses of the fallen have found themselves in the same position — forced to navigate a complex and often perplexing system of benefits. And although the nation has largely moved on from Iraq and Afghanistan, the federal benefits system has made it hard for some survivors to do the same.
Have we, WaPo? What conventional narrative crap are you peddling here? Obummer is having to go back into Iraq and he's leaving troops in Afghanistan. WTF are you talking about, largely moved on? Is that to get the wars that will cost incumbents their jobs off the table as an election issue?
I know survivors will never always have that emptiness. That is why I opposed these excursions based on lies from the start.
The system rewards most generously those who do not remarry or find work and weans those who do from compensation and benefits. Starkly put, survivors say, it has put a price tag on trying to move on.
Bagosy, who has a part-time marketing job, recalls learning that if she were to earn an income above a certain amount, her deceased husband’s Social Security payments would be reduced. The same rule applies to the widows and widowers of civilians, but it has hit survivors of the fallen — many of them young and lacking financial stability — particularly hard.
‘‘The rules associated with these benefits can discourage us from getting a job or doing different things and making different decisions because we’re afraid we’re going to lose what benefits we do have,’’ said Bagosy, a 31-year-old mother of two.
Survivor benefits have been paid to those left behind by America’s wars, in some capacity, since the late 1700s and have changed accordingly after each of the country’s major conflicts. Now, long after the Continental Congress established a seven-year pension for the widows of Revolutionary War officers, the family members of Iraq and Afghanistan’s dead are still struggling with a slew of taxes, lump sums, lifelong payments that dissuade an early remarriage and, above all, closure.
Bagosy’s first encounter with the benefits system came in the form of her husband’s life insurance, a $400,000 payment she received in a lump sum. She saw it as ‘‘blood money’’ and tried to get rid of it. ‘‘I tried to run,’’ she said.
And Bagosy ran, using the money to travel back and forth across the United States
Bagosy concluded that another relationship was not what would allow her to move on. ‘‘I finally realized . . . I’m the only one who can heal my family, and after four years, that’s what I’ve done,’’ she said.
Bagosy now receives about $1,500 a month and has used the benefits to keep herself afloat and her children in school. In the early months after her husband’s death, she realized that if she met a man she loved, marrying him would mean losing her benefits.
Under federal law, only surviving spouses who remarry after the age of 57 retain their annuities.
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That's sad. Let's try to end this on a happy note:
"Bowe Bergdahl details his capture" by Richard A. Oppel Jr. | New York Times August 07, 2014
During his first interview with the general leading an investigation into his capture by the Taliban, Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl on Wednesday described details of his disappearance from his tiny combat outpost in eastern Afghanistan five years ago.
It was the first time Bergdahl had formally described those events since he was released by the Taliban to special operations troops in May and flown to Texas after five years of captivity.
As soon as the session began, the investigating officer, Major General Kenneth R. Dahl, warned Bergdahl that he did not have to say anything that might incriminate himself. But the Army sergeant did not exercise his right to remain silent, one of his lawyers, Eugene R. Fidell, said in a brief telephone interview from Fort Sam Houston, Texas, where Bergdahl is based.
“He has responded to every question asked of him, and he has been afforded an opportunity to tell his story,” said Fidell, who attended the interview along with a military lawyer for the sergeant, Captain Alfredo Foster. It was mostly “just letting the facts unfold in his own voice.”
“It has been a combination of a conversation and a narrative, and it has been entirely nonconfrontational,” Fidell added. He said that Dahl was “a skilled interviewer, and he immediately put everyone in the room at ease.”
The Army appointed Dahl to carry out what is known as an AR 15-6 investigation and compile a report on the disappearance of Bergdahl, 28. The report will be sent up the chain of command, and it could lead to administrative or nonjudicial punishments, or court-martial. Superior officers could also conclude that no punishments are warranted.
The circumstances of Bergdahl’s disappearance on June 30, 2009 — when he was assigned to the 2nd Platoon, Blackfoot Company, of the 1st Battalion, 501st Regiment — turned into a political controversy after the Taliban released him in late May, following President Obama’s agreement to release five Taliban detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Some members of Bergdahl’s unit, and some lawmakers, criticized the prisoner exchange, or said the sergeant should face punishment. Those critics say he voluntarily walked off base and that he put men assigned to search for him — through a rugged, Taliban-infested region — in harm’s way.
Fidell has refused to describe Bergdahl’s own account of his disappearance, and on Wednesday he declined to say what his client told Dahl.
An earlier AR 15-6 investigation into Bergdahl’s disappearance, conducted by another Army officer, painted a critical portrait of poor discipline within his unit, and blamed the unit and chain of command for inadequately securing the area around the outpost, two US officials briefed on the classified report said in June.
Related: Bergdahl Deal Backfiring
What a piece of thoroughly crap investigation, huh?
The revelation of details of that report two months ago enraged some critics of Bergdahl, who suggested details were leaked to discredit soldiers who had publicly criticized him.
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There is bonus coverage if you need it.
"Richard Marowitz, 88; smashed Hitler’s hat" by Chris Carola | Associated Press August 09, 2014
ALBANY, N.Y. — Richard Marowitz was just a day removed from witnessing the horrors of Dachau when he found a top hat on a shelf in a closet in Adolf Hitler’s Munich apartment.
Still furious about the gruesome sights he had seen at the nearby Nazi concentration camp, the 19-year-old self-described ‘‘skinny Jewish kid’’ from New York threw the black silk hat on the floor, jumped off the chair he had used to reach it, and stomped Hitler’s formal headwear until it was flat.
‘‘I swear to this day I could see his face in it,’’ Mr. Marowitz said in a 2001 interview.
Mr. Marowitz, 88, who brought the souvenir back to New York after World War II ended, died this week at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Albany. On Friday, his son, Larry Marowitz, said that his father died Wednesday after battling cancer and dementia. His death was first reported by The Times Union of Albany.
Mr. Marowitz, born in Middletown, N.Y., and raised in Brooklyn, was playing trumpet in a swing band when he was drafted into the Army. He served as a reconnaissance scout in the 42d Infantry Division as it fought its way across Europe in 1945. On April 29, his unit was ordered to push ahead to a place called Dachau to beat other American divisions headed there.
In a 2003 interview he gave to an upstate New York high school’s WWII oral history project, Mr. Marowitz revealed how he and his comrades sped their Jeeps through German convoys and enemy positions, firing their guns all the way.
‘‘As we got closer to Dachau, we got this awful smell,’’ Mr. Marowitz recalled. They were among the first American soldiers to enter the concentration camp, where the GIs found bodies stacked inside rail cars and emaciated inmates who were barely alive.
‘‘The prisoners were just walking skeletons, and they just dropped where they were and died,’’ he said.
It was a combination of typhus and allied bombings that destroyed rail supply lines, but don't let that spoil the distorted Zionist narrative we have been taught all these years.
The next day, Mr. Marowitz was among a group sent to search Hitler’s Munich apartment. While looking in a closet, Mr. Marowitz found a top hat with the initials ‘‘A.H.’’ on the lining. He jumped up and down on the hat a few times in anger. It was April 30, the day Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin.
‘‘When he heard some skinny Jewish kid stomped all over his favorite hat, he committed suicide,’’ Mr. Marowitz joked in a 2001 interview.
Mr. Marowitz kept the hat and brought it home. Decades later, he started bringing it along when he gave talks about the war and the Holocaust at Albany-area schools.
Despite the horrors of combat and genocide he witnessed, the showman-turned-clothing manufacturer always sprinkled some humor into his stories, his son said. ‘‘He loved people, he loved to joke around,’’ Larry Marowitz said.
Hmm.
Mr. Marowitz’s story was told in a 2003 documentary film, ‘‘Hitler’s Hat.’’ At the veteran’s request, the family will donate the hat to a museum, the son said.
In addition to his son, Mr. Marowitz leaves his wife of 65 years, Ruth, and their daughters, Linda and Roberta Marowitz.
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My Zionist-controlled War Paper stomping on Hitler's head. And you wonder why I'm sick of them?
My Zionist-controlled War Paper stomping on Hitler's head. And you wonder why I'm sick of them?
Also see: Veterans say goodbye to the USS Saratoga
