Veterans Beware
Dear Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid,
Welcome to the 21st Century and the Internet.
There is a very good reason why all of the presidential candidates have promised radical reform of the American federal healthcare programs as a primary part of their bids for the job.
I am a 65 year old American Veteran and for most of my life, I have been traveling and working all over the planet. For as long as I remember, I have been hearing or reading about, from friends at work, at parties and cafes, on the radio and seeing on TV and now on the Internet, how Medicaid and Medicare are, the most screwed up, inadequate, inefficient, corrupt, parasitic mess of any federal healthcare programs in the industrialized world. It is something that any informed, decent American is embarrassed about and ashamed of.
Veterans beware!
What if you noticed that money was being systematically and routinely removed from your bank account and you had no idea why or by whom?
You investigate and, after you have lost a lot money (which you can never get back), you discover that your bank has a policy: They send you a note and if you do not sign it to declare that you do not give them permission to do it, they will automatically begin to remove money from your account.
How would a judge and jury see that?
If this kind of policy where to happen anywhere in life, other than in the case I am about to describe, it would be regarded as exactly what it is: Embezzlement, Fraud, Theft...
... Crime!
So why is our government allowed to get away with it?
I will explain why later... And it will still be CRIME.
Here is a quick, random sampling of what is being said on the Internet form the full political spectrum (Left, Right, Conservative, Liberal, Democrat, Republican, Independent, Young, Old, Male, Female, all races and religions etc.) and it's all real bad!
Http://www.alibris.com/booksearch. Detail? S=R&bid=8220722440&cm_mmc=shopcompare-_-base-_-nonisbn-_-na
Http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/9cb5d2aa-f237-464e-9cdf-a5ad32771b9f.htm
Http://www.ronaldwinterbooks.com/blog/12/politicians-want-veteran-support-but.htm
Http://thinkprogress.org/
Http://thinkprogress.org/
Http://rudepundit. Blogspot.com/01/three-simple-strategies-for.html
Http://rudepundit. Blogspot.com/01/taking-fight-to-where-they-live-part.html
Http://www.serendipity. Li/jsmill/us_is_f*ed.htm
Http://www.kuro5hin.org/tag/f*ed
Http://opovet. Blogspot.com/05/va-disability-financial-problems-direct.html
Http://www.biblio.com/details.php? Dcx=49030549&aid=frg
Http://cfricks. Blogspot.com/09/doctors-refusing-to-see-medicaid.html
Http://michaelsiegel.net/? P=322
Http://mainstusa. Blogspot.com/03/privatizing-walter-reed-rich-get-richer.html
Http://thinkprogress.org/01/18/medicare-pr-states/
Http://www.google.com/search? Hl=en&lr=&rls=GFRD, GFRD: 10, GFRD: en&as_qdr=all&q=veterans screwed by medicare blog&btnG=Search
Http://www.usndemvet.com/blog/archives/003059.html
Http://www.nytimes.com/03/25/washington/25cnd-benefit.html? _r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Http://www.bannination.com/comments/5028043
Http://www.google.com/search? Sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GFRD, GFRD: 10, GFRD: en&q=f*ed by social security
Also, I have for many years, been a regular at the Dallas and Albuquerque VA Hospitals and lately they are seething hotbeds of anger and discontent among both staff and vets. Check the conversations at the urinals.
Since 1935, most of you Social Security people (there are always dedicated exceptions in all professions) have been able to behave as typical, punch my card, pass the buck, put in my time and cover-my-ass bureaucrats and slip and slide along while your mess remains a mess and your employers and clients (the American people) get screwed because there has never existed a means of recourse which was accessible to anyone other than the very rich, big business and the legislators (The politicians don't get Social Security... Another story for a later time), that was powerful enough to do anything about it.
My mother just told me about how my father (a pilot in WWII) also got cheated and had to go through exactly what I have just gone through. Only back then there was no Internet so nothing got done about it.
Welcome to the 21st Century and the Internet and your good old days are numbered now.
You (the guilty... Yea you!) will somehow (boy it's going to be tough) learn to take responsibility for the job that we pay you to do or the Internet will put so much pressure on the politicians (votes, campaign contributions, petitions etc.) to hold you accountable that, if you don't, you will be lucky to have a career flipping burgers for the rest of your lives.
I am writing this because you have, until I caught you, been embezzling my Social Security checks.
My hometown is Dallas Texas and it gets very hot there in the summer. My VA doctors told me many years ago that if I have another heat stroke (I have had two), I will not go to the hospital... I will die right then and there. So, twenty something years ago, I bought a little piece of land at 9000 feet in the New Mexico Mountains and built (with my own two hands) an OFF GRID, ultra GREEN small summer home (which I had designed 20 years before) to escape the terrible Texas summers.
My mail comes to my mother's house in Dallas when I am living in New Mexico. I'm retired and sometimes I am late to read it and sometimes it just gets thrown away with the tons of junk mail that harasses all of us. The fact is that even if registered, there is no absolute guarantee that we will always read all our mail promptly as it is delivered or that the post office will even deliver it. And this has been the case since the mail was invented and before Rome ruled the Western World.
Registered mail is, however, a reasonable effort to try to ensure that mail is, at least, read. It does not guarantee ANY kind of signature, granting or denying permission to do ANYTHING!
Last year, I received notice from the Veteran's Administration that co-payments (a policy introduced long after I was promised by my recruiting officers that such things would never exist) to the Veterans' Administration would be withheld (stolen) from my Social Security Checks. I talked to the VA about this and got a waiver of the co-payments (a problem I never had to deal with until the Bush Administration started embezzling our VA money for its failed Oil Grab, Iraq Atrocity).
One day I noticed that half of my Social Security check was missing and not being deposited into my bank account and I assumed that the procedure, about which I had been warned by the VA, had begun.
My Social Security check is small to begin with but it is all money that I worked for and earned and paid into Social Security all my life. It is MY money and the United States Department of the Treasury is the bank that I put it in TRUST of, until such time as I would be eligible to have it returned to me. I went to see the VA about it and they granted me a waiver. They told me to be patient and after a while the checks would be whole again and that they would receive my withheld money and return it to me.
I waited and watched for several months as this continued and eventually I got suspicious so I checked back with the VA. They looked into it thoroughly, showed me their records and convinced me that they were not the ones who were stealing my money.
So I called Social Security and they spilled the beans.
My father's parents were poor, ignorant; very hardworking, pioneer farmers who were intimidated by anything from the government. If they had received anything about Medicare, before they were told personally by somebody that they trusted that they were eligible for it, they would simply have said it doesn't apply to them, they didn't understand it and thrown it away. If somebody is illiterate, blind, mentally handicapped, out of town or homeless; if it gets tossed with all the junk mail, or for any of a hundred other reasons, they just don't get the notice... Tough shit! (That's military talk)
At no other time in my life, have I ever known it to be possible for anybody; for any reason, to just take your money without your personal signature on some kind of legal document which authorizes and grants permission (and in many cases is witnessed and or notarized) for it to be taken from you.
Because it has gone unchallenged, the US Government has been getting away with doing exactly that, to the tune of BILLIONS, since Harry Truman was in the Whitehouse!
It seems that the policy, made legal by Congress, is to send notice when you turn 65, that Social Security will automatically start giving half of your check to Medicare regardless of wither you give them permission, sign anything, get the notice, read the notice, acknowledge the notice or in any way authorize them to steal or embezzle your money. Never mind if you are a veteran and are blessed with VA Health Care and have absolutely no need for, desire to have nor use for Medicare nor Medicaid.in fact, it's most advantageous for the government to deliberately ignore that inconvenience to them. Never mind if you are homeless or illiterate and never even know why half of the piddly little bit of support you have left when you are too old to work anymore, is stripped away from you for the rest of your life and you never know why. I have arranged for the theft to be stopped after June but I will never get MY money back and I will have received absolutely NOTHING, for it. I have been legally robbed by the United States Government.
This reminds me of another LEGAL policy which was not brought to light until the Walter Reed and related nationwide VA scandals were revealed by Sixty Minuets on CBS last year.
If you got your legs blown off in Iraq and did not fill out the forms and formally request it, you were not eligible for VA disability (which, of course costs a lot more than standard VA Health Care). And amazingly, it was perfectly legal for the Pentagon to simply, and deliberately, avoid telling you that you had to apply to get it. This was a cleaver and tidy little way to divert the money (away from you) to the Iraq Abomination so that a lot of other kids could get their legs blown off... Or die... For more NOTHING.
The government (especially the predators like the IRS and the Pentagon, except when they occasionally get caught,) has always been at complete liberty to devise all manner of sneaky little tricks, and incomprehensibly complicated and devious LEGAL ways to cheat and prey upon us...
... Until the Internet.
They still don't really understand it yet but that has changed, right under their noses and they never even saw it coming.
Ladies and gentleman of our legislative institutions, it was legal to kill Jews in Nazi Germany and it's legal right now, in some Muslim countries, for men to stone their wives to death. That doesn't make it right, that just makes it legal.
It's slow, often subtle and sometimes insidious but things do change, revolutions happen, they don't feed Christians to the lions in the Coliseum anymore and sometimes heads roll.
I invite you to notice that something has changed and you better change all the laws that enable the United States Government to legally steal from its citizens. And if you don't notice it, you'd best have some other line of work to fall back on.
Yours truly,
PS, it may take some years but I'm not going to drop this until I see it on national TV. I need to get all these folks on all these blogs organized and united into one force. It takes some time but it's not all that hard to do because when folks are angry about something, they enjoy forming mobs...
... And seeking revenge.
And then, so that maybe I can help in some small way to clean up the hideous mess and repair the horrible damage that the Bush Administration has done to my country (and NOT for the money), I intend to become the United States Ambassador to Italy.
JohnDallas, Texas
U.S.A.
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