Federal officials ignored repeated warnings to strengthen their oversight of federally funded, state-run homes for vets. Then came Covid-19.
Bennett Walsh, superintendent of the Soldiers' Home in Holyoke, speaks at a 9/11 ceremony in West Springfield, Mass. on Sept. 11, 2019. | Don Treeger/The Republican
the Veterans Administration, the precursor to today’s cabinet-level agency, was established in the 1930s, the federal government began paying a share. That grew into the current system in which the VA covers the costs for caring for elderly and disabled veterans. States often have to pitch in for part of construction and renovation costs.
U.S. Air Force Veteran Robert Aucoin, 78, gets his temperature checked prior to receiving his Covid-19 vaccine dose at the Soldiers' Home in Holyoke, Mass., Tuesday, Dec. 29, 2020. | Hoang 'Leon' Nguyen/The Republican “The performance of our VA team … as it relates to the CLCs, the retirement centers we run, has been very strong,” he said. “It’s been so strong that in many cases governors and state representatives have asked us to increase the amount of activity … we invest in the state-run homes.”
“I sat vigil by his side for two days, playing his favorite Polish songs and polkas,” said Turgeon. Her father, Dennis Thresher, died in a Massachusetts hospital in January. She said he had survived a serious bout of Covid starting in late March 2020 that landed him in the hospital. His The family of Donald Hawkins, a Vietnam veteran who died at an Oklahoma hospital in January, didn’t have even that small comfort, according to his great-nephew Todd Larkin, himself a veteran of Afghanistan. The family made increasingly urgent calls to the local Ardmore Veterans Center as word of deaths began to circulate in the community last winter.
Congress is now putting more than an additional $1 billion into the homes. It allocated $150 million in a late 2020 stimulus bill and $90 million in an annual spending bill for construction and renovation, which should also improve ventilation and infection control for future disease outbreaks, including bad flu seasons that can pummel the elderly. That spending bill also included a $100 million payment boost for coronavirus-related emergency expenses.
Melissa Jackson, who runs Vermont’s veterans home and is the president of the National Association of State Veterans Homes, said in an interview that the VA oversight is stronger than critics portray. At the Vermont home she directs, the annual inspectors show up unannounced, she said, and have free rein to interview both staff and the veterans themselves.
Some critics insist the Trump administration’s VA under then-Secretary Robert Wilkie was actually empowered to have gone in anyway amid an officially declared nationwide public health emergency. The VA could also have sought such explicit approval from Congress under one of the various Covid emergency packages, veterans’ advocacy groups said.
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