GOP Sen. Ron Johnson: It costs too much to fund the VA

The war on terror started on September 11, 2001. Congressional leadership has had almost 13 years to build up the VA with enough staff and facilities to care for the wounded from two wars. After news broke that the VA was failing our veterans, the Senate finally began to act. A bill was brought to the Senate floor that would allow the VA to contract with private medical facilities, enabling veterans facing long waits to get quicker treatment. The VA would also be able to use $500 million from its current budget to hire more medical staff. While I do not agree with allowing veterans to go to private medical facilities, this bill was a good start. The organization clearly needs more doctors, more nurses, more staff, more facilities. Only three senators voted against this bill. Of those three, one of them is my senator, Ron Johnson (R-WI).

Sen. Johnson said that he couldn’t support the bill because of its cost—$35 billion the first two years and $50 billion per year after that, according to a preliminary estimate by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

This is the same Sen. Johnson who said in a recent MSNBC interview that the current crisis in Iraq was caused because President Obama was not forceful enough about keeping troops in the country when the war ended. I am sure he would have found the money for that. I wonder if Senator Johnson would whine about the costs of the VA if just one of his three children had spent a year or more in some godforsaken hellhole like Afghanistan or Iraq.

Sen. Johnson married into money and has never worked a day in his life. The only constituents he cares about are the ones who agree with him. He does not and can not understand what our veterans are going through. Veterans need the specialized care the VA provides. The average family practitioner is just not able to deal with a double amputee with PTSD because it's just not something he or she was trained to do. Of course Sen. Johnson just wants to privatize veteran's care and make it a for-profit industry. To him, it isn't about caring for veterans—it's about making a buck for his wealthy donors.

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