The days of the Veterans Administration’s chronic shortfalls and criminal treatment of the nation’s warriors may be coming to a close, thanks to a recent piece of legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by President Donald J. Trump. But until the law kicks in and real reforms begin to take shape, many VA hospitals will continue to underserve the very people they are in existence to serve in the first place.
As reported by Off the Grid News, the last known living U.S. survivor of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941 – which triggered America’s entry into the global conflagration – was recently denied hearing aids at a VA in Philadelphia for a very common, and wholly unacceptable, reason: Federal bureaucracy. (RELATED: Trump delivers: Taking ‘SWAT team’ approach to slashing bureaucracy)
The site noted that a paperwork error on the part of the Department of Veterans Affairs was reportedly to blame.
CBS Philly reported further that the vet, Alexander Horanzy, 94, went to the VA to get the hearing aids, and they were sitting in front of him on a table after he was told he had already been approved to receive them and had them tested and fitted.
“So I drove him up there and they wouldn’t give them to him,” said his granddaughter, Joyce Fiore, in an interview with KYW News Radio. “They said his medical records were lost in a fire. They had them right there, so he was denied.”
The vet himself was not happy about the snafu either. “I was so darned mad I couldn’t even talk,” he said. “My granddaughter was there with me, so we just walked out.”
Reports noted that Horanzy nearly perished seven decades ago after contracting malaria while fighting in the mosquito-filled jungles on New Guinea. The Greatest Generation Fondation noted further that prior to his combat there, he had seen the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as a young Army private.
Nevertheless, the VA lost his paperwork and because of the VA’s fault, Horanzy wasn’t able to get the hearing aids Fiore said he desperately needed.
“He can’t talk on the phone much and [hear] the TV,” she said. “It’s very hard for him,” she added, noting without the aids he has difficulty getting through his day.
The Greatest Generation Foundation has set up a GoFundMe page to help Horanzy pay for his hearing aids, which is here. At the time of this writing, $7,868 had been donated; Horanzy only needed $6,500 for the hearing aids.
These kinds of outrages will hopefully become fewer and farther between, thanks to recently passed reform legislation aimed at fixing what has chronically ailed the VA. As reported by The National Sentinel:
In keeping campaign pledges to “fix” the “broken” VA system, President Donald J. Trump signed legislation on Monday sent to him by the GOP-controlled Congress that gives vets the choice of seeking care for military-related conditions in the private sector.
The Veterans Choice Improvement Act tears down barriers that Congress had erected around original “choice” policies enacted in the wake of the 2014 scandal in which a number of veterans had died waiting for care after being placed on phony rosters as a way to make it appear as though the facilities were keeping up with demand. At the time more than 100 facilities around the country were involved in various cover-ups, prompting the two-year pilot program that gave vets some choice but still limited where they were permitted to see private physicians. (RELATED: Drowning in bureaucracy – U.S. has more tax preparers than all police, firefighters combined)
But now, with expanded choice the law of the land, it “may just be the relief valve the system needs in order to function better: By shifting a portion of its patient load to the private sector, the VA will be left with fewer vets to treat and thus, the available resources can be stretched further than ever before,” The National Sentinel noted.
“No solutions are perfect, but this one gets close.”
See more outrageous (but true) news stories at OutrageDepot.com.
J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.
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