Veterans Affairs

The Department of Veterans Affairs will open a new outpatient clinic for veterans in Southern Maryland next year, Secretary Eric K. Shinseki said Thursday. The facility in Charlotte Hall is intended to serve the large veteran population in Southern Maryland, home to Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Naval Support Facility Indian Head and other military installations. Rep. Steny H. Hoyer welcomed the announcement. He said the current VA outpatient clinic in Charlotte Hall is over capacity and "cannot fully meet the needs of our community.

WASHINGTON -- With millions of seniors facing premium increases for their Medicare prescription plans, Democrats say they have a solution: Use the government's buying power to bargain for rock-bottom drug prices. The Department of Veterans Affairs does it for 5 million patients, they point out, so why not Medicare with its 43 million? Medicare sets rates for hospitals, doctors and medical equipment such as power wheelchairs -- as well as drugs administered in doctors' offices. It was only the Republicans' ideological commitment to the private sector that led them to bar the government from negotiating discounts with drug companies, Democrats contend.

Gov. Parris N. Glendening ordered immediate improvements yesterday for Garrison Forest Veterans Cemetery in Baltimore County, where more than 1,000 grass-less graves are mired in mud and surrounded by weeds. Mike Morrill, the governor's director of communications, said Glendening's order was in response to complaints detailed in a Sun article that Morrill sent in an e-mail to the governor as he traveled from Prague, Czech Republic, to Germany on a trade mission. "He sent back word that this situation is absolutely unacceptable, and he has instructed the [Maryland Department of Veterans Affairs]

WASHINGTON -- In often-poignant testimony, veterans -- from World War II as well as Desert Storm -- told Congress yesterday of being unwitting medical subjects for a military they said has since abandoned them.Speaking before the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, they described numerous illnesses and other health problems that they blamed on secret experiments, preventive drugs or vaccines they were given, or exposure to environmental chemicals or other possible hazards.Moreover, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)

The records U.S. federal agencies relied upon to conclude that Persian Gulf war veterans are no sicker than the general population excluded thousands of veterans treated for illnesses by doctors at federal clinics and by private doctors paid by the government.The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' statistics also do not include other veterans who chose to go to private hospitals or doctors and pay for their own medical care.In an interview last week, Dr. Frances M. Murphy, who is responsible for the Veterans Affairs Department's program to treat gulf war veterans, said the diagnoses of veterans who were treated by clinics and private doctors, rather than at VA hospitals, were left out of the department's computer databases.

A conservation group hoping to restore a degraded stream in Crownsville is decrying a state plan to transfer 67 acres of an environmental area to Maryland's veterans agency for grave sites. The state Department of Veterans Affairs wants to expand Crownsville Veterans Cemetery by annexing land along Cypress Branch from the adjacent Severn Run Natural Environment Area. The agency said that it will need more acreage in 50 years to accommodate projected demands for veterans' burials at the 103-acre cemetery.

The Baltimore Sun's coverage of Charles Whittington's suspension from the Community College of Baltimore County ( "Campus Bars Veteran over Combat Controversy," Nov. 22) is a painful example of our failure as a community to serve those who have served our country. Eloquently, painfully and without hesitation, Mr. Wittington wrote of his feelings as a combat veteran in his college essay. He reminded the readers that he was lawfully trained to kill. He reminded them that he didn't leave that training behind in Iraq and that he did not receive training to handle the "stress and addictions" of war. In short, he spoke the truth — about war and about his experience as a soldier and a veteran.

I applaud the Call of Duty Endowment for its funding of employment services for veterans ("Amvets awarded $250,000 grant to open veterans career centers," March 20). But private generosity alone won't close the 5 percentage point employment gap between young vets and their civilian peers. Yet as with so many other necessary functions of government, gridlock in Washington imperils services for veterans. Budget cuts mandated by the sequester will de-fund housing aid, job training and other services veterans require.

WASHINGTON -- As budget battles continue on Capitol Hill over the girth and role of the federal government, awed respect is in order for the long-standing ability of two government departments to elude scrutiny, let alone the spending reductions sweeping through Washington.They are the present and past of America's military establishment, the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs, a symbiotic duo, with less than ever to do but more money than ever to do it.While Congress and the White House have set the rest of the federal government on a downward fiscal trajectory toward the balanced-budget goal of the year 2002, the spending plans for the two departments are pointed upward, a testimonial to their political untouchability.

Oooops! When Congress and the White House put together the recent bipartisan $150 billion economic stimulus package, they raised the maximum mortgage limits in high-cost areas for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration. But lawmakers neglected to include a similar increase for the government's primary home purchase program for veterans -- VA-backed loans. While the limits of the other three programs now extend to $729,500 in the highest-cost areas -- at least through Dec. 31 -- VA loans remain capped at $417,000.