Koch Brothers GOING TO DESTROY health care for Veterans and No One Knows About it.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/28/1406562/-The-Koch-Brothers-are-About-to-Destroy-Veterans-Health-Care-and-No-One-Knows-About-It?detail=facebook

The war on workers' rights has shifted to a new and unlikely battleground this week: the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. And for the more than 350,000 employees and the veterans they serve, the stakes could not be higher.

Let me explain. In the wake of last year's "secret waitlist" scandal - where VA managers rigged the scheduling system to make it appear that more veterans were being seen than actually were - Congress passed a law giving VA Secretary McDonald the authority to fire bad managers and the resources to hire enough staff to care for the massive influx of new vets into the VA system. Were it not for the brave VA employee whistleblowers who put their careers on the line to speak out and expose the list-rigging, we never would have known the problem existed.  

Today, the VA is seeing more patients than ever before while continuing to deliver quality, integrated care designed just for veterans. There is still a lot of progress to be made in filling the more than 40,000 job vacancies at VA medical facilities across the country, but the trend is undoubtedly headed in the right direction.  

Now along comes Representative Jeff Miller and Senator Marco Rubio who saw an opportunity in the waitlist scandal; not an opportunity to improve access to care for veterans, but an opportunity to chip away at the basic rights to due process that protect all VA employees from discrimination and wrongful firing.  

Miller and Rubio's proposals - H.R. 1994 and S. 1082 - would do away with those vital rights with the stroke of a pen. They do nothing to address the current $2.5 billion funding shortfall facing the VA; they do nothing to add new hospital beds or fill vacant positions. Their proposal instead would make every VA employee - doctors, nurses, benefit claims processors - at-will employees who can be fired at any time with little to no recourse.  

But Miller and Rubio are not alone in pushing this dangerous agenda; they are doing so with the full backing of a "veterans organization" called Concerned Veterans of America, which was recently exposed as a Koch Brothers-funded front group in a scathing report. Unlike other veterans groups, CVA lobbies aggressively to privatize the health care veterans fought for, gut the rights of VA workers, and reduce veterans' benefits in the name of smaller government.