February 19, 2009 by admin.

By Alyssa Rosenberg arosenberg@govexec.com February 12, 2009

Legislation introduced on Thursday would fund veterans health care for two years at a time so the Veterans Affairs Department would not have to rely on the sluggish annual budget process for those appropriations.

“There’s only one thing more important than having the right resources in the Veterans Affairs Department, and that’s having them in a timely, predictable fashion,” said Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, who introduced the legislation in the House. His committee counterpart in the Senate, Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, introduced a similar bill. “Without that, you can’t hire, you can’t fill vacancies, you can’t purchase equipment. You essentially ration health care.”

Beginning in fiscal 2011, the bill would provide funds to VA health care programs for the current and subsequent fiscal years. Akaka said the budget process now is so slow that VA has received its appropriations in 19 of the last 22 years after the start of the annual fiscal year, which is Oct. 1.

“The largest health care system in the country — to which millions of wounded and indigent veterans turn to for care — does not know what funds it will receive, when it will be funded, or in reality, whether vital programs will receive funding at all,” Akaka said during a Thursday press conference.

Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said he had worked with veterans who relied on clinics that are able to operate only a few days during the week because they must conserve their lean budgets.

The legislation is a major priority for the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents VA health care workers. The union said that inconsistent funding for VA makes it difficult to hire doctors and nurses when necessary, or make long-range plans for the health care workforce.

“We can’t hire anyone [in the second half of the year] because we don’t know what the budget’s going to be,” said J. David Cox, AFGE’s national secretary-treasurer. “Then, we get our funding in February, and we need to hire everybody, but nurses aren’t coming out of school then. They’re coming out in May and June.”

The union also is planning to push for expanded collective bargaining rights for VA registered nurses, physicians’ assistants, and dentists. Cox said the union would advocate strongly for both the funding legislation and the collective bargaining legislation, which Filner introduced on Feb. 10. The National Federation for Federal Employees also is supporting the collective bargaining bill, saying that increasing workers’ rights and input would improve conditions at VA.

Congress and the Government Accountability Office have expressed concern about growing vacancy rates in the VA’s health system, especially among certified registered nurse anesthetists, whose vacancy rate is 13 percent. At 43 medical facilities GAO examined nationwide, 15 said that 40 percent or more of their CRNA positions were vacant.

During Thursday’s press conference, Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, said he placed some local programs on two-year funding cycles when he served as Anchorage mayor, which gave the city more time to concentrate on how to improve them.

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February 17, 2009 by admin.

By Michael Feldberg

 http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | For Jews who wish to observe the rituals of their faith, wartime may pose seemingly insurmountable challenges. The exigencies of war can make the observance of the Sabbath, holy days and the kosher laws very difficult. Jewish soldiers must, on occasion, subordinate religious observance to combat. Despite the frequent priority of war over religion, there are times, such as the funeral of a fallen Jewish soldier or at the bedside of a wounded Jew, when religion can shape war policy. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Jews could not serve as chaplains in the U.S. armed forces. When the war commenced in 1861, Jews enlisted in both the Union and Confederate armies. The Northern Congress adopted a bill in July of 1861 that permitted each regiment’s commander, on a vote of his field officers, to appoint a regimental chaplain so long as he was “a regularly ordained minister of some Christian denomination.” Only Representative Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, a non-Jew, protested that this clause discriminated against soldiers of the Jewish faith. Vallandigham argued that the Jewish population of the United States, “whose adherents are … good citizens and as true patriots as any in this country,” deserved to have rabbis minister to Jewish soldiers. Vallandigham thought the law, which endorsed Christianity as the official religion of the United States, was blatantly unconstitutional. However, there was no organized national Jewish protest to support Vallandigham and the bill sailed through Congress. Three months later, a YMCA worker visiting the field camp of a Pennsylvania regiment known as “Cameron’s Dragoons” discovered to his horror that the officers had elected a Jew, Michael Allen, as regimental chaplain. While not an ordained rabbi, Allen was fluent in the Portuguese minhagim (ritual) and taught at the Philadelphia Hebrew Education Society. As Allen was neither a Christian nor an ordained minister, the YMCA representative filed a formal complaint with the Army. Obeying the recently enacted law, the Army forced Allen to resign his post. Hoping to create a test case based strictly on a chaplain’s religion and not his lack of ordination, Colonel Max Friedman and the officers of the Cameron’s Dragoons then elected an ordained rabbi, the Reverend Arnold Fischel of New York’s Congregation Shearith Israel, to serve as regimental chaplain-designate. When Fischel, a Dutch immigrant, applied for certification as chaplain, the Secretary of War, none other than Simon Cameron, for whom the Dragoons were named, complied with the law and rejected Fischel’s application. Fischel’s rejection stimulated American Jewry to action. The American Jewish press let its readership know that Congress had limited the chaplaincy to those who were Christians and argued for equal treatment for Judaism before the law. This initiative by the Jewish press irritated a handful of Christian organizations, including the YMCA, which resolved to lobby Congress against the appointment of Jewish chaplains. To counter their efforts, the Board of Delegates of American Israelites, one of the earliest Jewish communal defense agencies, recruited Reverend Fischel to live in Washington, minister to wounded Jewish soldiers in that city’s military hospitals and lobby President Abraham Lincoln to reverse the chaplaincy law. Although today several national Jewish organizations employ representatives to make their voices heard in Washington; Fischel’s mission was the first such undertaking of this type. Armed with letters of introduction from Jewish and non-Jewish political leaders, Fischel met on December 11, 1861 with President Lincoln to press the case for Jewish chaplains. Fischel explained to Lincoln that, unlike many others who were waiting to see the president that day, he came not to seek political office, but to “contend for the principle of religious liberty, for the constitutional rights of the Jewish community, and for the welfare of the Jewish volunteers.” According to Fischel, Lincoln asked questions about the chaplaincy issues, “fully admitted the justice of my remarks … and agreed that something ought to be done to meet this case.” Lincoln promised Fischel that he would submit a new law to Congress “broad enough to cover what is desired by you in behalf of the Israelites.” Lincoln kept his word, and seven months later, on July 17, 1862, Congress finally adopted Lincoln’s proposed amendments to the chaplaincy law to allow “the appointment of brigade chaplains of the Catholic, Protestant and Jewish religions.” In historian Bertram Korn’s opinion, Fischel’s “patience and persistence, his unselfishness and consecration … won for American Jewry the first major victory of a specifically Jewish nature … on a matter touching the Federal government.” Korn concluded, “Because there were Jews in the land who cherished the equality granted them in the Constitution, the practice of that equality was assured, not only for Jews, but for all minority religious groups.  

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