I sat this morning and read through a 30-line story....."Biden Administration Will Offer Gender Transition Surgery Through VA Healthcare".
Basically, the White House folks told the VA to handle this surgery, and if you detail out cost factors.....no one really said there's more funding in the bucket to handle this.
Cost factor? Well....at the bottom end of the scale....just to take a whack on your 'Johnson' or create a 'Johnson'....it's $15k. Then you go up a notch...adding boobs, and this usually involves another $5k (depending on who does it), and if you wanted all the bells and whistles....it could climb up to the $40k range.
The mental side of this, and the drugs (steroids)? You might as well add another $10k for the first year.
But here's the thing.....having chatted with vets over the past twenty years....generally, they all have this marginal respect for the VA. Out of forty-odd services or practices they run....there's probably five to ten that they do a decent job with, and the rest of the services or business operations are 'graded' marginal to crap.
So I could see a hundred guys walking into the VA....all hyped up and going to finally get free transgender surgery, and three months later....the majority waking up to find that they are in terrible shape because of screw-ups or infections from the hospital.
But there's one other odd characteristic about the VA, which most folks don't grasp. If you were a guy who had some pain and discomfort....wanting extensive tests done....you'd show up and get the first line of doctors to agree on testing. Then they'd let you know that testing would not be possible for 90 to 120 days. Even if it proved something and surgical procedure was next....you might be waiting another month or two. So these Trans-wannabe folks might be shocked....there's probably going to be a waiting list of 3,000 people and a wait of 300 days likely to occur.
Whats likely to happen? I'll predict five years in the future...some Senate investigation occurs, and three-hundred vets appear with pretty sad stories how they were supposed to be 'transformed' (promised will be the word used), and now they feel like crap twenty-four hours a day because of screw-ups.
It's a rough world out there, but I suspect things just got a notch worse for some folks.
