Green energy gets the green light while people that served our country with honor have to wait in line, dying while waiting.
For example, does anyone other than Eco-zealots give a flying f about having solar car ports at the VA?
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) at its Phoenix Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona, plans to install a 3.003-megawatt (MW) DC solar electric system. This project will expand a 630-kW carport system currently under construction by SunWize Systems at the site.
It seems to me that the VA has failed their primary mission, and in a spectacularly bad way. Nobody other than eco-zealots gives a rats-ass if your office is sustainable – but they DO want you to adhere to your primary mission take care of veterans. The word “shameful” doesn’t begin to describe the FUBAR at the VA. – Anthony
From the Washington Times Opinion Section:
The administrators at the Veterans Administration have apparently been busy while old soldiers waited to see a doctor, after all. Serving those who served is not necessarily a priority, but saving the planet is Job 1. Solar panels and windmills can be more important than the touch of a healing hand.
The department early on set up an Office of Green Management Programs designed to “help VA facilities nationwide recognize opportunities to green VA, and to reward innovative ‘green’ practices and efforts by individual facilities and staff within the VA.” This sometimes means paying more attention to greening the department and saving the polar ice caps than to health care.
In the department’s words, it adopted a far more important mission to “become more energy efficient and sustainable, focusing primarily on renewable energy, energy and water efficiency, [carbon-dioxide] emissions reduction, and sustainable buildings.”
Heads should roll, and the jury is still out on whether that is literal or figurative.
Jesus, words fail me when you read of treatment like that. They deserve so much better.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/heroes-for-a-day/
Pointman
This is what happens when we let the lunatics take over the asylum. It’s rampant now pretty much everywhere in the Western World. How did this happen?
This seems to be the game plan in the medical field all over. Nice buildings with amenities out the wazoo and crappy care. The VA has had a pretty good record of care, up until the last fiasco.
A typical bureaucracy – it exists to feed itself.
Disgusting.
“The Energy Policy Act of 2005 requires all federal agencies to be getting 7.5 percent of their electrical energy from renewable sources by the year 2013, and every year thereafter.”- Russ Goering, Energy Engineer for the Oklahoma City VA Medical Center
——
The OKC VA solar installation cost $4.6 million and saves $110,000 per year, giving a 41+ year payback, at current electricity prices. The solar installation has a life expectancy of 20 years.
http://city-sentinel.com/2012/11/va-funds-solar-energy-project-in-oklahoma-city/
The good doctors and care givers at the VA hospital in OKC saved my life and I have nothing but praise and gratitude for their efforts. The VA system has the potential to be a model of treatment, but suffers from the same political incompetence from above, as all the rest of the US bureaucracy.
Keep in mind people the VA is a 100% government run health care system just in case anyone was fantasizing about a single payer health care utopia. If this is how they treat vets how do you think they are going to treat the rest of us?
anyone else have the feeling our government has grow too big…..
Alan Robertson, they were putting those panels up when I was last at the VA in Little Rock. My brother was the sick veteran. He spent 11 days in ICU. That ICU staff was a crack unit, many of the nurses were veterans. They knew what to do and how to do it. They saved my brother’s life. Period. Unfortunately, outside that unit, things could get dicey. Once my brother got a room upstairs, the service degraded immediately. The nurses either didn’t care or weren’t trained or simply had no business being a nurse anywhere, let along the VA. So, yeah, there are some highly skilled, highly reputable staff in The Veterans Affairs. But it’s just like today’s modern science. A bunch of rotten apples are spoiling the whole batch.
These people are crazed. Gripped by fads like teenage girls and twice as easily distracted.
In BC schools there is so much emphasis on green “sustanability” they forget to teach the kids!
Any veteran can tell you: the VA hospital care is the shame of this country.
No different in the UK.
The NHS contributes only 3% of UK carbon output, which itself represents only 1.5% of world output. Yet it is obsessed with reduing it’s ‘carbon footprint’ with layers of specialists and jobsworths driving it from one end, and the Goverment financially penalising Health Trusts at the other end for not doing more. Meanwhile, the poor bloody medical staff are trying to improve health care in the middle of this ludicrous waste of monetary and human resource
it’s not just the $20 Million for solar panels at the VA hospital in Phoenix . They’re putting up solar panels and windmills at cemeteries and other VA installations nationwide. People playing at saving polar bears from imaginary perils while real Veterans really die. This is what you get when you let the government take over your health care.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2014/06/green-energy-for-dead-vets.html
VA = obama care lite
Latitude says:
June 20, 2014 at 9:12 am
anyone else have the feeling our government has grow too big…..
—
By a factor of 10
I should add that the situation in the UK National Health Service dscribed above applies to all government funded institutions. Our political leaders should be locked up and the key thrown into the great Trenberth heat sink.
…plans to install a 3.003-megawatt (MW) DC solar electric system.
Don’t they realize that 0.003 MW will be aged out between placing the first panel to eventual final completion, if they could ever see it all while taking normal electrical losses into consideration?
Are these the same type bureaucrats who will praise saving 3/10 of a cent per hour per patient by switching to verifying patients are receiving the right medication in the right doses for only 37% of time, as that’s the breakpoint where patient care is only marginally affected according to the $138,500 study they commissioned?
…and did any of the VA administration fail to get their bonuses while many an ailing, deserving vet got the short end of the stick or worse?
Absolutely disgraceful.
An Office of GREED Management Programs , designed to reward cronies and neglect Vets .
FUBAR is an accurate description .
Sick
FUBAR primarily because of a DILLIGAF attitude
If you take the complaints/concerns about the VA then change the letters VA for NHS you will find that the same complaints/concerns are made. The problems are there because they are both bureaucratically run health systems. Bureaucracies run for the benefit of the bureaucracy not for the people that have the misfortune to use them.
The NHS in the early days was staffed by people with the ideals of the organization in mind rather than bureaucrats. The same almost certainly pertained for the VA. That sense of personal duty has now greatly reduced and the organizations are run by people who want to grow and protect the bureaucracy.
Do web searches for:
Waiting times NHS
malnutrition dehydration NHS
My wife is a disabled vet who requires regular treatment for her condition. We recently moved, which means she has to wait months to see a primary care physician. Then she has to get a referral to the Pain Clinic and wait months for that. Then she has to get evaluated, tested and put on the treatment schedule. The best estimates are this will take a year. There’s a waiting list for every step.
We can’t get a direct referral from the Pain Clinic at the old treatment center to the Pain Clinic at the local hospital. The process essentially starts over. The only thing missing is the initial wait to file a claim. If we tell the old center we’re relocating, her treatment goes into limbo for months.