I’ve had the pleasure of writing for, and about, America’s military personnel, veterans and their families for 42 years, the last 25 years through this weekly news column for daily newspapers near
Defense Department officials have preached three goals for the Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA) over the last several years of cost-cutting reforms: preserve shopper savings; reduce taxpayer suppor
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Three-star personnel chiefs and senior non-commissioned officers of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps testified Wednesday that unsafe and sometimes scandalous conditions of base housing un
Like many military physician colleagues, Dr. Richard W.
The Defense Commissary Agency and the military’s three separate exchange services should be consolidated under a single resale enterprise for the purpose of streamlining above-store and back-of-sto
The number of veterans eligible for health care services in their communities, using networks of private sector providers contracted by the Department of Veterans Affairs, is expected to jump this
On Tuesday Jan. 29, attorney and retired Navy Cmdr. John B. Wells sat in the office of Sen.
Veterans who flooded the Department of Veterans Affairs with reimbursement claims for private sector emergency care, in the wake of their appeals court victory in the Staab case, have been getting
The Department of Defense has released final numbers on military folks, by branch of service, who switched into the new Blended Retirement System (BRS) during a year-long, opt-in period that ran th
The Army, Navy and Air Force are finalizing plans to eliminate over the next few years more than 17,000 uniformed medical billets – physicians, dentists, nurses, technicians, medics and support per
With passage of the new Blended Retirement System (BRS) in 2016, the Defense Department’s Office of Actuary, assisted by computer modeling from the think tank RAND Corp., made some assumptions crit
“Constant misinformation from the President is a real problem in a democratic society, and we in Congress have got to do our best to hold him accountable,” said Rep.
In September, three months after signing the mammoth VA Mission Act, President Trump claimed in a speech that soon “if a veteran can’t get the care they need from the VA in a timely fashion, they h
Using the last arrow in their quill, veteran groups and service organizations urged President Trump on Wednesday to use his personal influence with two Republican senators to persuade them to allow
Four veteran groups and a prominent military association have joined forces to pressure Sen.
As many as 90,000 ailing “Blue Water Navy” veterans are likely to have to wait for a new Congress to see legislation passed that would make them eligible for Agent Orange-related disability compens
Blaming old computers and unanticipated software challenges, the Department of Veteran Affairs saw its pending claims inventory from Post-9/11 GI Bill participants peak in mid-September at 207,000,
Nearly 15,000 military children with autism receive Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) services, usually 20 or more hours of therapy per week, to learn desired behaviors and douse undesirable behavi
Earlier this year the Department of Veterans Affairs executed a clever rewrite of a regulation to avoid reimbursing hundreds of thousands of veterans for non-VA emergency health care costs that the
As envisioned and directed by Congress two years ago, this was to be the month that the five-year-old Defense Health Agency (DHA) assumed management responsibility for all Army, Navy and Air Force
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of student veterans, despite having robust GI Bill education benefits, contend they were deceived into racking up federal loan debt through abusive practices of certain
VA Secretary Robert Wilkie has refused to provide Rep.
Veterans have reason to be uncertain over what Congress and the Trump administration plan both for “Blue Water Navy” Vietnam War veterans who have Agent Orange-related ailments, and for veterans se
TRICARE, the health insurance program for military personnel, retirees and their families, recognized by 2015 that it had become the target of corrupt pharmacists, doctors and marketers peddling wi
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