➡ The VA is trying to improve its services for veterans, but there are concerns about underperforming employees. Some argue that having more employees doesn’t necessarily mean better service. There’s also debate about whether veterans should be sent to civilian medical facilities for better care. The Trump administration has faced opposition from unions over these issues, with some accusing it of attacking worker rights and waging class warfare.

➡ The article discusses the need for a three-way conversation between the Veterans Affairs (VA), unions, and patients to improve the VA system. It questions whether changes like breaking union contracts will truly benefit the patients. The author suggests that the opinions of the patients, who are the consumers of the VA services, should be considered in these decisions. The article also mentions the need for funding to continue providing quality content and information, and encourages readers to support the network.

➡ The text discusses a subscription service costing $9 per month or $90 per year, with a discount code for a free month. It then moves on to discuss changes in union contracts aimed at improving veteran care and reducing bureaucracy. The changes are intended to free up resources and time, allowing for more efficient scheduling and record-keeping. However, there are concerns about whether these changes will truly enhance services or if they will negatively impact the work environment and the quality of care veterans receive.

➡ Veterans often face long wait times and benefit denials from the VA, with unclear reasons for the denials. The VA’s system for assigning disability percentages is complex and interactions with VA employees can be negative. Despite attempts at reform, the quality of service often declines, possibly due to factors like poor leadership, outdated systems, and funding gaps. However, there is hope for improvement with new leadership trying fresh ideas, despite facing resistance.

➡ The text discusses the need for veterans’ voices in improving the VA system. It questions the effectiveness of changes made without consulting the veterans themselves. The author suggests that instead of relying on surveys, a group of veterans should be included in the conversation to make meaningful improvements. The text also introduces a potential health breakthrough involving Coriolis versicolor mushrooms, which reportedly helped a woman overcome a severe lung condition.

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All right, so just the other day, folks, the VA announced that they are cutting ties, they’re cutting ties with unions. And this has sent ripples, ripples through the VA federal workforce. What we haven’t seen yet is the reaction from veterans and people outside the VA workforce. And of course, they are citing Donald Trump’s executive order from I believe it was back in March. And Doug Collins has this initiative to cut fraud, waste and abuse and cut workforce at the VA to free up time, space and money. So today we’re going to dissect what happened. And then I did a little bit further research with a little bit of, to get a little bit of numbers, some stats, some data.

So we’ll go through all that today. So today’s conversation, we are going to structure it around the va, cutting ties with unions. It’s a pretty big move, it sounds like. And I believe that it is going to have very mixed reactions from everybody involved, insiders, outsiders, everybody. So stick with us, folks. Don’t go away. We start now. Hey everybody, and welcome here to the next episode of the Richard Leonard Show. I would like to thank you for joining us. As always, it’s always great to see the show continue to grow. It’s see people participate and all those other things.

If you are a regular listener, viewer of the show, I’d like to thank you. I’d like to thank you for being here and coming back. If you’re new to our community, to our little family we have here, thanks for coming. I hope that you’ll stick around and stick with us. So before we get going, let’s talk about again how the show is made possible. That’s Cortez Wealth Management. Get over to AmericaFirstRetirementPlan.com peruse the site, gather all the data. There are links and documents and things there for you to look over and digest. Carlos Cortez and his staff wants to get you down the road to a tax free retirement plan and other financial planning services.

So get on over to americafirstretirementplan.com check them out, gather all the information that you think you may need and then give them a call, sign up, give them a call and let them help you navigate this whole initiative to create yourself a tax free retirement plan. You deserve it. You deserve it. You owe it to yourself in many respects, I would say. So get on over there one last time. That’s AmericaFirstRetirementPlan.com check them out now. Okay, so housekeeping is over, all right. And the VA The VA has announced they are cutting ties with unions. Now the only, let’s add this in.

The only jobs or the only positions or whatever you want to call it that are not being affected by this new initiative to cut ties with unions are the police, firefighters and security guards. They are going to continue to be represented by unions and collectively bargain for their contracts. Everyone else seemingly is about to be to cut. So they did back in April, the VA quit taking union dues. And so maybe people saw this coming and maybe this is part of Doug Collins initiative to cut the just the overall liability of the VA and they’re doing it.

So let’s go through this here because what I really want to do before we get to the end of the show is throw in some data, some stats, some numbers to just try to make it a little bit more clear about what’s actually happening and who’s being affected. And so full disclosure about this current topic or this particular topic. I guess I don’t really know how I feel about the overall thing. I was a federal employee. I did work for the VA for a little bit and I will say that the representation of the union was good.

I didn’t use them for anything. I didn’t have any grievances. I didn’t have any concerns or anything with my time there. I wasn’t, it wasn’t there very long, to be quite honest. I had taken a job at the VA that I really, I really didn’t want to do. I really wasn’t excited about being there every day. But it was a job. I needed to do it at the time. And so my opinion about the whole thing and the way I see it is maybe a little skewed. But anyway, let’s get through this information and then we’ll, we’ll dissect it.

The veteran Veteran affairs leaders on Wednesday of this last week, so I believe that was the 6th of August, announced plans to terminate nearly all of its collective bargaining contracts with federal unions, upending employment agreements for hundreds of thousands of department workers. The move affects members of the American Federation of Government Employees, or afge, the national association of Government Employees, NAGE and the National Federation of Federal Employees, the National Nurses Organization Organizing Committee and National Nurses United, NNOC and the NNU and the Service Employees International Union, the seiu. So there is two, four, six different unions that are being cut off from the va.

AFGE alone, which is, let’s go back. American Federation of government employees represents 300,000 employees working for VA. That’s about 80% of the departments roughly. The VA across the board roughly employs 450,000 people, so AFGE represents 300,000 of them. Department officials said the move was made to make it easier for VA leaders to promote high performing employees, hold poor performers accountable and improve benefits for services. Improve benefits and services to America’s veterans. And so like, here’s the, here’s the part for me right here, which is I’m kind of in favor of, and we’ll get to this a little bit later in the show.

But for many years, for many years, there’s been a lot of bitching and complaining about the quality of care, customer service, appointment availability, just availability of specialists and specialty clinics, or all those things as it relates to the va. And I would go out on a limb and say that there is many veterans in our country that probably don’t have great experiences to share about their use of the VA system. Now, along with that, I have personally had many conversations with many different veterans over however many years. And I would say you get both sides of the coin.

I’ve talked to many veterans who have had great experiences at the va. I would say that I’ve had great experiences at the va. In fact, one of the doctors I see regularly at the VA is really the only medical professional that I absolutely trust, without a doubt. But I’ve also had a whole shit ton of conversations with veterans over all the years that did not have good experiences. I’ve talked to multiple veterans who said I will never ever use the VA system for any care for anything whatsoever, never again. And so you get both sides of the coin.

And so that’s why I say this particular topic I’m a little undecided on at the current time. I think that there’ll be time for more information to come out to us for me in particular to make a better assertion of what actually is happening and how I feel about it. But I can understand that the off the cuff initial reaction from a lot of people is not going to be positive. Folks in my experience, and from what I know of unions, folks who are represented by unions or who pay dues in the unions and all those things seem to really like it.

It’s also been my experience, in my opinion, that unions who represent more blue collar workers do a lot better job at making sure things are fair, being pretty hard nosed about what it is they’re willing to agree to when it comes to terms of new contracts. The couple times I have personally belonged to a union when I was a state or federal employee, I don’t Feel like our union representation really bent over backwards to make sure that we had the best of whatever it is we were looking to see whether it was pay or vacation time or office space or supply, whatever it is.

It’s always been my experience that blue collar unions do a really good job at taking care of their people and advocating for their people. And it’s not as prevalent in my experience, in my opinion, in more white collar or corporate type jobs, office type things. So anyway, let’s see here. Department officials said the move was made to make it easier for VA leaders to promote high performing employees and hold poor, poor performers accountable and improve benefits across the board for veterans. In a statement, VA Secretary Doug Collins attacked the unions as inefficient and harmful to veterans care.

Too often unions that represent VA employees fight against the best interest of veterans while protecting and rewarding bad workers. We’re making sure VA resources and employees are singular, singularly, say it slow, singularly focused on the job we were sent here to do, which was providing top notch care to those who wore the uniform. And so nobody can argue with that. Nobody can argue with the fact that everybody, well, I shouldn’t say everybody, most people would agree that the VA’s primary job is to do whatever it can to make the, the experience in a VA facility or your experience with VA care benefits help adjudication of your claims, whatever it is, to make it easier, more efficient and take less time for you, the veteran, the customer.

And if there’s a lot of scuttlebutt around the organization that underperforming employees cannot be disciplined or fired or replaced and we have to reward those people who are doing subpar work. I don’t know. And if that’s the case, if that’s really the reason, I don’t know how I could pose a good argument to that. I think that we all know anybody who’s worked in the professional workspace at all can agree that more people doesn’t necessarily mean better outcomes. It doesn’t necessarily mean better customer service. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the organization is better. You can have 10 people who are assigned to do the same task or 10 different tasks and you’re always going to have those who aren’t quite up to snuff.

Usually most of the time there’s a couple weak links and I’m not talking about people who make a mistake here or there, or folks who are new, who are learning and just are having trouble grasping the duties of their job day to day. And they just need time to figure it out and learn. I’m talking about people who wake up every day and say to themselves, man, I gotta go there again. Or they pull up in the parking lot and before they get out of their car, they think to themselves, all right, put a smile on your face and just fake like you want to be here eight hours and counting and then we can be done.

We get to go home. We get to go do whatever it is we want to do. And I think that when you have those one or two or three or four, depending on the size of your work group, it hurts the overall collective, it hurts the overall outcome that you’re trying to achieve as an organization. And so, again, if the idea is to make things easier by more efficient for, for veterans, for the consumer, and provide a better quality of care than what we’re currently receiving, well, maybe this isn’t such a bad idea. But let’s continue.

Members of President Trump’s administration have fought with union officials for months. In April, Virginia stopped withholding union dues. We talked about that for most employees paychecks. Citing an executive order excluding some federal agencies from labor management relations programs, Wednesday’s move does not impact unions. Representing 4,000 VA police officers, firefighters and security guards. Officials said the executive order does not apply to those types of positions. Union leaders for months have protested against proposed cuts at VA and other federal agencies, arguing the smaller staff will hurt delivery of benefits and health care. They’ve also accused Collins of working to prioritize va, or, I’m sorry, to privatize VA services by sending more money for medical appointments into civilian hospitals and medical offices rather than VA clinics.

Well, guess what, folks. If the VA’s job is to provide the best services for the men and women who wore the uniform and served this country and did so honorably, fulfilled their contract, lived up to their word, then why should they not get the best care? Now, we made arguments on this show in the past about how it would be great if the VA was able to have the best doctors, the best professionals, the best specialists, the best nurses, the best this, the best that. But the truth is that seemingly, and the more that you read into this stuff and the more that you do some research and the more that you talk to people and the more that you just watch what’s happening, you understand a little bit better that those specialists, those doctors, those nurses, those seasoned professionals, that really would help to improve the agency, they’re not coming to work at the va.

They’re not coming to work there because they’re going to make half of what they’re making or 20% less than what they can make on the civilian side. And so when we do find really, really good professionals, like I was telling you earlier, that the only doctor that I really 100% trust is at the VA. He’s amazing. He’s great. I appreciate him because he does bend over backwards to help with things and to provide context to the things that may be going on with you and talk about multiple different avenues for treatment or healing or to manage or whatever.

And in my opinion, you don’t get that everywhere. You don’t even get that in civilian doctor’s offices most times sometimes. And so when you have that, you latch onto it. But again, if sending veterans to the civilian medical facilities is going to provide them better care, they’re able to see a specialist for whatever condition you insert, condition here and there, and it’s going to work. And not only that, but it’s quicker and it’s a little more efficient, easier for the veteran to walk in there, do whatever paperwork, they get the treatment, and go home and not have to worry about anything else, then if that’s what you call privatizing the va.

Well, I think that there’s a lot of veterans who are in need of specialty care or just care in general that would love to be able to get in in a month or two weeks versus four months or six or God knows when. Now, it is nice. It is nice to be able to, as a veteran of the United States military, say, I have a place that I can go that is meant just for us. It is nice to have that. Not only is it nice to be able to live with this idea that the government is trying, right, the government is trying to live up to the promise they made, that they made to each of us individually when we signed our name on the line, we put our hand on a Bible and rose the other one and sworn allegiance to this place, to this country, to this land.

But if you’re going to tell me that, well, it could be better, it could be better than the care I’m getting here. Now, there are a couple things. There are a few things that you will not get in the civilian medical facility. Things like you’re not going to walk in there and know that just about everybody you see gets it. They get it a little bit. You have that commonality with everybody who’s there to receive services. Everybody at one point in their life chose to raise their hand, swear an allegiance, take an oath, recite a creed of some sort, served honorably, for however long they did.

And now they’re coming to the same place because that’s for us, that’s for the veteran community. You’re not going to get that at a civilian medical facility and you’re going to walk in and who knows, who knows where the people around you come from and what they’re doing and why they’re there and where they’ve been and blah, blah, blah. And I suppose I should correct myself because somebody else will. You don’t get that in the VA either. And you don’t know what everyone’s there for, but you do know where they came from. And so you have this, this, this feeling of camaraderie, this, you know, like this distant family feeling at times, depending on where you’re at and whatnot.

But those are just a couple things. You won’t get in a civilian medical facility, but you will at the va. The use. The unions have also filed numerous lawsuits against the president’s proposed changes to the federal bureaucracy. On Monday. So this last Monday, a federal court of appeals. On Monday, a federal appeals court paused a preliminary injunction that had blocked department heads for making changes to collective bargaining agreements, allowing Wednesday’s contract termination to move ahead. So the courts are, the courts are apparently on board with this. At the time, AFGE the national president, Everett Kelly, called the ruling a setback for fundamental rights in America and promised continued opposition to Trump’s proposals.

In a statement after Wednesday’s announcements, Kelly criticized Collins for attacking VA worker rights. The decision to rip the negotiated union contract for majority of its work workforce is another clear example of retaliation against AFGE members for speaking out against the illegal, anti worker, anti veteran policies of the administration. Here we go. We don’t apologize for protecting veteran healthcare and will continue to fight for our members and the veterans they care for. Officials from the National Nurses United accused the Trump administration of waging class warfare against working people of America and similarly proposed continued legal challenges. Now waging class warfare against working people of America.

And so here’s where the conundrum for me comes because I can kind of understand where they’re coming from. I can understand where the people of this nurses. What is it? National Nurses United. I can kind of understand where they’re coming from. Coming from, they have somebody they feel is looking out for their best interest and that person is there to negotiate contracts for pay, vacation time off, sick leave, blah, blah, blah, blah, workplace conditions, all of those things. So they have representation to negotiate with the va. Hey, if you want the services of our nurses, this is what you have to do.

Sure, a lot of you understand union contracts probably a lot better than I do. But at the end of the day, what are. And here’s the part that kind of grinds my gears and we’ll get to this again for sure. But it doesn’t seem anytime we have these conversations, anytime some source puts out this type of information, there’s never any information on there about whether or not they asked the veterans, whether or not they asked the consumer, the people who are being cared for by all these folks represented by unions. And in my opinion, it seems that if we were to ask the consumers, if we were able to ask the patients what they felt about all these things that Doug Collins and President Trump and the unions have to say, would veterans agree that this is a good move? Not veterans who are working in the system who are going to be affected.

Because we know what they would say. But let’s ask the patients. How do you feel about your VA experience over the last X amount of years? Has it gotten better? Has it gotten worse? Has it stayed the same? Do you feel like the people who check you in are knowledgeable? Are they able to help you if you have an issue with an appointment or paperwork or anything like that? Is the place clean? Does it seem like there’s enough supplies? Are you able to get your medication? Are you able to get bandage up? Are you able to do all the things and are you happy with it? Because all we ever have in this particular type of conversation is the agency.

So in this instance, the va, and we have the unions. And so what we hear is Doug Collins talking in some sense, on behalf of the consumer, on behalf of the patients. And maybe he’s right. Maybe what he says is true. Maybe what he says is how veterans feel. But how can we be sure? I mean, Doug Collins is a veteran. He did serve in the military for quite a while. He’s been in government a long time. But is he. Is he effectively relaying the feelings and the messages of the patients of the veterans who are using the system? I don’t know this president.

So this is the. I believe this is the head of National Nurses United States. This president has made it clear he has no respect for the Constitution. But we believe strongly that our right to join together and collectively bargain is constitutionally protected. It cannot be swept away through an overreach of an executive order based on spurious claims. Virginia officials said that in addition to eliminating unneeded restrictions on hiring and firing policies, breaking union contracts will free up more than 187,000 sq feet of office space is currently being used up by representatives of all these unions. At the start of 2025, federal unions represented more than 1.3 million government workers across a host of agencies.

So this is, this is not just, just for clarity, this is not just about VA workers. A couple of these unions also represent workers in other agencies. And so I’m sure that there will be news or is news out there about other agencies who are also going to be affected by this eliminating of union contracts. But I think what’s really important is to come to an agreement. I think that at some point there has to be an agreement made between the agency, so in this instance the va, the unions, but also the patients. And if that conversation happened, my question would be, are the unions and the VA willing to listen to the third party, AKA the consumer? And are they both willing to make concessions to fulfill whatever it is the veterans say they need, the patients say that they need? And I don’t know, I think that’s a pretty important, it’s a pretty important piece.

If we’re going to really solve the problem, if the VA is really overburdened, if the VA is really spending too much money and can’t afford to keep up this type of influx of veterans and then provide quality care to everybody as deserved, everyone agrees that it’s deserved, well then what are we going to do to change it? And so unless we have that three way conversation in my mind, we’re never going to really get true answers. I believe what we’re going to get is reorganization and restructuring of contracts and agencies and who’s here and what’s there.

And we’re going to cut these people, we’re going to cut these programs, we’re going to cut this funding and then we’re going to repurpose funding and send it to this part of the VA and blah, blah, blah, all the shuffling around and meanwhile the men and women who are walking into these clinics or into these hospitals or these facilities every day don’t really see a change. So that’s the other part of the conversation. What is it that me, the veteran, in this instance, when I walk into the VA next week, I’ll be there next week for an appointment.

When I walk into the VA next week or next year or in the next two years, am I going to notice a difference by you canceling these contracts? Is my experience going to get better, worse, stay the same? And so maybe this is a really, really good time for these VA experience? Officer, the VA hires these people and they call them experience officers. And part of their job, a big part of their job, is to make sure that the experience you have at the VA is a good one. They want you to be able to, if they asked you for it and if it was available, maybe it is, I don’t know.

I would never participate in Google reviews and shit of the va. But just to simplify it, what I mean is these experienced officers want you to be able to leave a VA facility and if so inclined, get out your phone and leave them a five star Google review. Okay, so you want my five star Google review. What’s going to change? Because I can tell you there’s not one time I’ve been to a VA facility for care or a meeting or an appointment or lunch even that I would give a five star review to a VA facility.

Now, there’s a couple people that I’ve worked with that I certainly would give good reviews. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the masses, the overall agency. So digest that for, for a minute. We have to take a break. We’ll be right back. Don’t go. Hey folks, real quick. Before we get back to the show, it’s no secret that we have been experiencing a loss of sponsorships. Sponsors have been leaving the network or the network leaving sponsors due to our convictions. And so we have recently began to ask you, the viewer, for help.

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We can’t do this work without you. We can’t continue to bring you all of this amazing content without your support. So thank you once again for, for being here. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for supporting us. We, we really do appreciate it. We really do love you. Thank you. All right, folks, welcome back here to the, the end of the show. We got about 20 minutes left, so I wanted to just go through some, some, some details I picked out and then some things I thought of as, as how this, how this whole thing was framed and how it might be taken.

So based on the information that we just read, here’s some compare and contrast bullet points that I came up with. One of them is, I have written down here on my notes, union contracts. They’re being cut to improve veteran care and freeing up time and resources. And so we’ve already talked about that, right? Like if they’re going to significantly improve the care that we receive at the VA and free up some resources and make more time for workers to actually get things done, get notes entered, get appointments scheduled, get things, whatever it is, whatever it is that they need to do in their position.

If we’re going to free up some time for that well, then that’s great. And it says here it’s meant to cut red tape. Cut red tape for the veterans. For example, here’s one that I can tell you. And maybe the process has changed. I haven’t went to the VA records office at the local hospital and requested records for a couple years. But in the past, you couldn’t just go down there, request your records, fill out the one. Fill out the one piece of paper, and then give them half an hour, 40 minutes or whatever to get the records you requested.

Now, the caveat to that is, if it was one or two pages, okay, no problem. But many veterans need records for supplemental insurance claims, or maybe they’re going to community care and they need records to show what’s been done. And so maybe a lot of that has been digitized. And so what I don’t know is if I make an appointment or I call the VA to make an appointment for, let’s say, an eye exam, and they can’t get me in for 60 days. Well, according to policy, then it’s on the VA to find me a local eye doctor, as local as possible, make me an appointment, set up the payment for my visit, let me know when that is.

And when I go to my appointment, I go, I check in, I show them my VA ID and my license or whatever it is they ask for, go get my. Get the care, Go get my eye exam, and then when I leave, wave goodbye, walk out the door, the VA is going to pay that doctor, and then all is good. Now we continue on to the next appointment, whatever that may be. And so if doing this is going to free up time and resources for those things to work smoothly, well, okay, well, that’s a benefit. That’s a benefit to us, the veteran, the consumer, the patient.

Because in the past, it has been. I don’t know if it’s overly prevalent, but it has been a prevalent accusation that you hear from, from veterans in different places that while, yeah, I was. I was supposed to, and I haven’t heard from them to make me an appointment or I went and. And those people didn’t know how they were getting paid, so they didn’t want to. They didn’t want to see me or whatever. And so, like, there are, there are a lot of different things that happen as it relates to VA care that most people don’t know about unless you’re there to receive it or unless you work there and you kind of understand how the system works.

The common perception is that, well, it’s the va. They’ll just call your local eye doctor, tell them you’re coming and send us the bill and that’s it. Well, it doesn’t work that way. You need referrals and you need letters and you got to have this and that and the other thing and you got to, you got to go to this place or maybe they couldn’t find you an appointment anytime soon so they had to make you an appointment an hour away. And so, I mean some of these things are just complete happenstance, right? You got to just kind of grin and bear it and do what you got to do next.

1,750,000 hours a year were being spent on union activities instead of job duties. So just like many other industries or many other agencies or whatever you want to call it, most people who are union reps also have a full time job to do. And a lot of these places, especially in local, city, state, county, federal government work, by law, I believe your employer. So in this instance, the VA has to allow these union reps x amount of time to do union activities, to meet with people, to help with grievances, to show up at termination meetings or whatever it is, go to negotiations.

I’m sure there’s training, there’s all kinds of different things, different activities that representatives of the union in your place of work have to accomplish. And so if we’re doing all of this during the workday and you’re being paid for 40 hours of work and let’s just say six hours of work, a pay period or six hours a month, whatever that commitment to a union representative and the agency is, well now you’re doing that work on taxpayer money. And so the argument is, and I guess I don’t know whether how much I agree or disagree with this, but the argument is that union time was on taxpayer dime.

Hey, that rhymes. Union time is on taxpayer dime. Taxpayers don’t like that. When we have just went through, and earlier this year after the inauguration and President Trump unleashed doge on the federal workforce and let them go out and find where we’re wasting money, find these stupid ass contracts and all these initiatives and this aid and everything else, we all saw it, we all read about it, we all heard about it. So we’ve already exposed a ton of fraud, waste and abuse, all on taxpayer funding, taxpayer money. And so now here is another thing that maybe most people, most taxpayers may not understand what goes into being a union rep and how much time and resources that the unions do take away from any individual’s workday, any given person’s workday and so, you know, whether it’s right, wrong or indifferent, it’s an argument that’s been made.

Streamlining bureaucracy. Oh my goodness. Streamlining bureaucracy will help deliver better results to veterans. That’s the narrative that they put out. And then what I put here is that message in particular is that this will enhance services and not reduce it. Well, okay, that’s what they say. But again, this has not been something that was presented to the patients, to the veterans, to the consumer to see how they feel. Do you think, do you think that cutting union contracts and allowing just the agency to dictate hours, worked, pay, promotions, discipline, workplace environment, all of these things, is it going to enhance the service that the consumer gets when they walk up to the counter at the VA or when they call or when they file a claim? Because see, all of these things, right? Let’s talk about filing a claim.

There really is no guideline that’s posted anywhere that tells you if you file a claim on August 11, by October 11, you’ll have an answer, you’ll have a denial, you’ll have an acceptance letter, you’ll have an award letter, you’ll be contacted. Nobody really tells you what it is. And I believe that the standard is 30 days. Right. When I file something, when I file a claim, or when I file an intent to file, you can file this thing called an intent to file, which means I intend to file a disability claim. I’m notifying you of it today, and you have X amount of time to get that claim filed.

And if granted, then your, your, your award goes back to the day that you intend. You, you submitted your intent to file. And so is all that really going to be streamlined? So here’s some common beliefs that, that I thought of, and this is just kind of based on what I know and what the article said. The VA is slow, unresponsive and bureaucratic. And I think that we have many examples of that. We have many people who could provide examples of that. And the latter, I think there’s a lot of folks on either side of the coin.

Why do people feel like the VA is slow, unresponsive, and has way too much red tape, way too much bureaucracy, probably long wait times, denials of benefits. There are veterans all over this land who do file their claims and they get denied and think to themselves, well, wait a minute, they said I could file if this happened to me while I was serving. And so when you get denial letters, it’s not really common for them to tell you exactly why they denied you. What they do send you with your denial is the benchmarks that they look for in your claim, the things that if you have condition A, you need to meet A, B, C, D and E.

And if you meet all those, well, then this will be granted. It’s kind of the matrix that they use to assign a disability percentage. And then, of course, your monthly payment and interactions with VA employees reportedly is not always great. And like we were saying earlier in the show, I believe there’s a lot of people that work for the VA that pull into the parking lot and think to themselves, all right, man, it’s 8 o’ clock in eight hours. I don’t have to pretend to like to be here. I can go home. So let’s put on a happy face.

Let’s go into work and just go through the motions. Today, I believe that that is something that is a thing in the VA workforce. How deep does it run and is it everywhere? I guess I don’t know. But I do know for sure that you, that you can just tell, right, when you walk up somewhere and you have an interaction with somebody working at a particular place, you can tell whether or not they want to be there. You can tell if they’re a person that probably just has to be at work, right? Because we all got bills to pay.

We got to eat, we got kids to feed, we got vehicles to pay for. We have our own medical bills. We got this, that, and the other. We got all kinds of things, right? Everyone has their own shit going on. And so you got to have a job, you got to work. And so I think that no matter where you’re at, you’re probably going to run into folks who just really don’t want to be there or they’re just having a bad day. Reforms never seem to result in meaningful improvements. And why do people feel that way? Because veterans experience the same problems, regardless of who’s in charge.

So this is a really good one. Tell me in the comments below, if you can, the last time that it was apparent that veterans and the community that may support veterans or be involved in veteran stuff, when was the last time that there was overwhelming joy about anybody’s experience at the va? Now, I’m sure there are a couple instances here and there of people who have went in and had maybe a successful operation or they’ve had, you know, they went and got tested for cancer again, it’s gone. Oh, my God. Whatever we did worked. And so, like I was saying, everyone has their good experiences, but it’s not usually the majority.

It’s not usually the majority of the, of the experiences that you hear about. They’re not really always all that positive, but there are some. What’s next? What else did I put here? Cutting corners under the banner of efficiency. That usually backfires. When we talk about doing things to make organizations more efficient and we’re going to start cutting things out. It doesn’t really always seem to take. Right. It doesn’t always seem to actually be an improvement. A lot of times what it seems like is someone had a good idea and thought, well, maybe it’ll work, maybe we can get away with this.

But not usually. Usually what happens is service quality suffers more after reforms. Right. Because now you’re going to get the people that want to fight back but can’t really afford to leave. They got too much time invested. You know, they’re maybe five to six years from retirement or on that downward slope and they, and they, they really can’t leave the organization. Which is, which is maybe why we see everlasting declining experience reports at the va. It’s maybe why we hear more about the bad than we hear the good. And maybe, I guess, Devil’s Advocate, maybe it’s just an issue of bad news travels faster and more people will bitch than they will talk about the good things that happen.

Maybe it’s a thing of. When I leave the VA and I’ve had a good experience, I just go about my day without any complaints. And the flip side of that coin. The flip side of that coin is that when things are fucked up and I don’t have a good experience and the person I talked to was grumpy, clearly didn’t want to be at work that day. Well, we’re going to talk about that more, right? We’re going to, we’re going to, we’re going to point that out on social media. We’re going to tell our friends and our family and, and other veterans, you know, the VA is just a bunch of.

They’re all just, it’s all horseshit. But maybe we don’t hear a lot of veterans leave the VA and talk to their buddies and go, hey, man, you know, I had a really good experience at the VA today. We probably just don’t hear those. So I’m not, I guess I’m not sure how to, how to take that one is blaming federal inefficiency on unions, missing the bigger picture. Poor leadership, outdated systems, funding gaps. There’s a lot of different things that we can blame federal inefficiency on, and maybe those are things like poor leadership. Do I believe that the VA currently has poor leadership in Doug Collins? I think that it’s a little bit too early to tell.

I like the message that Doug Collins puts out. I like the idea. Much like Pete Hegseth, we are here to take care of the veterans. Doug Collins message is that we are going to do whatever we need to do with the VA to ensure that the quality of care gets better, that more veterans come to VA to get their care, because this is the place that’s made for them, and we want to take care of them. We want to fulfill this promise that our country made so many years ago to the men and women who had wore the uniform and sacrificed everything for this country, but also perpetuate the narrative to future soldiers.

Hey, we appreciate the idea that you want to serve or you’re just beginning to serve or you are currently serving. We want you to know that when your time is done, should anything bad happen to you, God forbid you have a place to come, get care to be taken care of. I like that message. Now, I think that it remains yet to be seen how Doug Collins carries out that message. I think that that. That part of the issue we have now is that every move he makes, there’s always going to be somebody that disagrees. It’s always going to be somebody that might be pissed off about it.

And when that happens, which is almost every time, at least whatever is reported, whatever he publicly puts out, is met with just complete resistance all the time. And so do we have great leadership in the va? I think potentially we do. I think that the message he puts out, as we just discussed, is good. I agree with that. We need to make this place better for the men and women who are who it was meant to serve. And quite frankly, it appears to me that Doug Collins is doing things that have not been tried before. And so maybe it won’t work.

Maybe nothing he says and nothing he does will work. But damn it, he’s trying something new. He’s bringing fresh ideas to the table and trying them. But it’s certainly not going to be. It’s not going to be a good thing for the patients. It’s not going to be a great thing for veterans. It’s not going to be advantageous to us wanting to continue to use the VA if things don’t get better. And things won’t get better as long as every single time he takes a step forward, he’s met with a barricade of resistance. And to be quite honest, if I had to Theorize about what really is going on.

It’s all this resistance and all this discontentment because Trump put him there. And all these people hate Donald Trump so much. But what I do admire is that the administration, the cabinet, all these people are not paying a whole lot of attention to it. They talk about it in briefings and on the news or whatever, but they’re still marching forward and doing what it is they say they’re going to do under the guise of the idea that, well, we’re doing what the American people asked for. The American people voted this man in and these are the initiatives that he talked about and then they, he won the election.

So this is what we’re going to do. I can respect that. And so I guess, you know, in closing, my final reflection that I wrote is this. Can we really improve a system by cutting out the very people who understand its day to day failures? Or are these just cosmetic changes that make headlines but not a difference? And I think that the answer to that question or questions remains yet to be seen. I think that the ideas that are put forward could have some legs. I think they could find some success. But we at the end of the day have to come together about how we’re going to fix this issue at the va.

How are we going to improve the quality of care? Because that’s the main overarching goal. Whether we tear up union contracts or we sign more of them. Are we going to make the experience and the care better for the people it was meant to be there for? Or are we just arguing over paychecks and time off and who’s got control of this and who’s got control of that? And like I said before, I don’t know that we ever will really get to the answer to any of these questions until we include the voice of the patient.

Until we bring veterans who have no connection to employment with the va, who have no connection to anybody that works for the va, just veterans who are using the system. Ask them. You see, what we are told is that the veterans of this country are a treasured resource. They are a treasured commodity. But there is a whole lot of discussion about how we are going to change things to better the lives of veterans. We are going to make the lives for this, for this community of people way better. Just listen to us is what we’re told.

But then when we veterans, the patients, the consumers of all of this fucking malarkey at times, never have a voice. Yeah, sure, they send us out some surveys, fill this out and we’ll give you a $10 gift card card. Okay, but what happens to those surveys? Where do they go? And what are the results of these surveys that again, we’re sending taxpayer funded rewards to, to just get us to try to fill out a 30 page survey. They send them in the mail with this promise to send you some Visa gift card, hey, fill out the survey.

Or here’s a website, go to this website and fill out the survey. And it takes you four hours. And if you can get through without it freezing or shutting down or timing out, you’re just pissed off anyway. So how effective are these surveys? What I think would be way more effective is to somehow assemble a consortium of veterans of consumers and invite them into the conversation. Maybe it’ll take a while, maybe it’ll take a while to find enough people to have a constructive conversation about this stuff, but I don’t know that we’re going to make all of these changes under the narrative that we’re going to make things so much better for veterans without asking them.

I’ve never understood how anywhere in government they can say, well, this is going to be so much easier for you, you’re going to be so much more happy. But they never ask the people that they’re trying to help or they say this is going to be better for. So who says it’s going to be better? The people that stand to profit on it. The people that stand to get more time off or get a raise or get a better paycheck or get a better office. Maybe they want a corner office with some fucking ferns and windows.

What about the old guy stumbling into the VA clinic who had a really difficult time getting out of bed and it took him a whole lot of energy and effort just to get into the car because he hurts when he moves. I mean, there’s a whole litany of what ifs we could talk about. But I say all that to say until we get the voices of the people we’re actually trying to affect to be part of the conversation. I don’t believe that things are going to overwhelmingly get better. And so maybe it’s maybe baby steps, maybe we got to take it slow.

But I would argue ever since I started using the VA system in 2007, we’ve been told, well, just hold on, things are going to get better. And there have been a couple things, there have been a couple things that came out that were helpful to veterans, but boy, it’s probably 10 to 20% of what they say it’s going to be better for us, but we could, we could come up with examples all day. We’re out of time. I want to thank you guys for being here. Thanks for joining us. Have conversations. Ask if you know veterans, if you are a veteran.

Ask them. Ask them about things like this. Ask them, hey, the VA announced they’re cutting union, they’re cutting unions, they’re cutting them out. The VA wants to manage employees. They want to discipline, they want to reward them, they want to hire them, they want to fire them, they want to come up with time off. They want to do all of this instead of having union representation. What do you think about that? Talk. Talk to veterans about it. See what they say. If you are a veteran, you have an opinion, put it down in the comments. Let’s have a conversation about it.

But anyway, we’ll see you guys next week. Thank you for being here. Take care of yourselves. Have a great rest. Oh, man. Have a great rest of your weekend. Good night. As Christians in a Christian country, we have a right to be, at minimum, agnostic about the leadership being all Jewishly occupied. We literally should be at war with Israel a hundred times over, and instead we’re just sending them money and it’s fucking craziness. Look at the state of Israel. Look at the state of Tel Aviv and look at the state of Philadelphia. You tell me where this money’s going.

You tell me who’s benefiting from this. I am prepared to die in the battle fighting this monstrosity that would wish to enslave me and my family and steal away any rights to my property and to take away my God, Go fuck yourself. Will I submit to that? And if you’ve got a foreign state, you’ve got dual citizens in your government, who do you think they’re supporting? God, right now? Would you protect the nation of Israel and protect those of us, not just our church, but every church in the world and in this nation that’s willing to put their neck on the line and say we stand with them.

You go to Trump’s cabinet, you go to Biden’s cabinet, it’s full of Jews. I have a black friend in school. I have nothing against blacks. She has nothing against me. She understands where I’m coming from. Excuse me. I’m a Jew. And I just like to say that, you know, in our Bible, it says that you’re, you’re like animals. The Jews crucified our God. Here on the break, folks, we’re going to talk about mushrooms. What do you know about mushrooms? Specifically coriolis versicolor. Mushrooms. Well, I don’t know a whole lot, but I have some friends here that do.

So I want to introduce you to Kurt and Kristen Ludlow. Hello, folks. How are you? Great. How are you doing? Very good. We have limited time. I don’t want to rush. I don’t want you to feel rushed, but I’d like you to tell us quickly about Coriolis versicolor mushrooms and. And this breakthrough that seemingly not a whole lot of people have. Have been informed about or know about. But we’re here to change that, so help us out. What do. What do you know? Absolutely. Well, let me give you some background real quick on it and how we got our hands on it.

First and foremost, one of our partners here at the company, his mother, was dealing with a very severe issue that affected her lung. She was attending Sloan Kettering. That issue ended up getting worse. They tried everything medically they could to resolve it. Nothing worked. And so they gave her two months to live. He started reaching out to friends and family regarding her circumstances. And her cousin or her nephew out in. In Japan reached back and said, look, I have something. It’s just in a capsule form. It’s a mushroom. We have a proprietary way we extract it.

You know, he was talking to her son, his cousin, and said, why don’t you have your mom try it and just see if this, you know, might help her out in any way. And so she started taking it. And after 30 days, she noticed quite a considerable difference in the way she’s feeling. Month two went by, more improvement. Month three, she’s feeling as if there’s no issues whatsoever, and she goes back to Sloan Kettering. Sure enough, they run lab work on her and find that condition to no longer be there. And so they were flabbergasted. They wanted to know what she was doing.

And of course, she was able to reach out to her nephew and bring all the information that they requested to them. And that’s where the first clinical study started here in the United States. And from there, M.D. anderson started studying it. The American Cancer Society, Loma Linda, Harvard. It’s been published in the Library of Medicine many times. And today there’s hundreds of studies on this mushroom. And what they’ve concluded was that it didn’t cure, it didn’t mitigate, it didn’t prevent anything. But specifically, it would modulate the immune system and get it working optimally again. And if we can get our immune system working optimally again, I think you can agree that it’s the best way to resolve any type of issue that we might be dealing with because that’s what it’s designed to do.

And so for years, you know, if that happened to your mother, our partner Simon, could not keep from telling anyone that would listen to him about it. And he started getting all types of reports back from different people with all kinds of different things that they were dealing with that they were noticing some great results with it. And it wasn’t just for sick, you know, people. It was for people that didn’t want to get sick, that wanted to be proactive versus reactive and, you know, many great things that people were saying with renewed energy, feeling younger, sleeping better, things like that.

And so eight years ago, what ended up happening is one of our partners, aside from Simon, Steve, he lost a dog due to cancer within two months. Gino, our other partner, also lost a dog due to cancer and two of their children. And so they were sitting around looking into it. And the dogs are all between the ages of 4 and 8. They were young and they weren’t happy about it. And here they had this mushroom that, you know, they’d been getting out to people for years as well as us. And they thought to themselves, wow, I wonder if this is safe for animals.

And sure enough, they found a study done by the University of Pennsylvania declaring that dogs that were taking this product were living three times as long as the dogs that weren’t. That had a very aggressive form of cancer. And so at that point, that’s where pet club 247 was born. Because they knew that they had an incredible strain. And here’s what they found out, Richard, is 65% of our pets are getting cancer today. One in three allergies, 6 million new cases of diabetes are going on. They’re medicating them with human medications. And our pets are living half as long as they used to.

In the 70s, the average age of a golden retriever was 17. Today that average ages 9. And they wanted to do something about it. So they added this mushroom into incredibly well put together products with no bad ingredients. Because what they found and why these conditions were happening was it came down to, like, our humans, you know, it’s the foods, treats and toys they’re eating. Their regulations are very loose and is causing all types of issues as a result of that, on top of all the other things that are going on. And that’s, that’s where the company was born and that’s where we are today.

That’s, that’s, that’s a beautiful story. I, I think that there are so many people that are looking for something that’s not, not from the mainstream, not from big pharma or whatever the case may be. I mean, I mean, we all have these, these stories, right, about grandma’s old home remedies. And I’ll tell you what, I’m super interested in this because I have a dog. His name is Gus. He’s a bernadoodle. He’s six, five or six years old. He was supposed to be a mini. He’s now 108 pound lap dog. And he does, he does struggle with some hip issues, only at five or six years old.

And he also has these subdermal, almost acne like, bumps on his skin along his back and his side. And so as you’re explaining all this, I’m thinking of, I’m thinking about Gus. I’m thinking, man, we need to get him these, these mushrooms. I also, I also think about veterans, right, who, who have service animals and they get super attached. And they, I know a few that have been through two and are on their third dog now. And it’s a, it’s a real struggle for some of these guys because the training’s long, they get super attached. They take these pets everywhere.

And so this type of product, the mushroom, I think, would be perfect for the veteran community as well. Do you guys see veterans or law enforcement or anything like that? Do people use them for these pets as well on top of some other supplements or anything else that might be out there on the market? Absolutely. Because regardless of what our pets are going through or even what they might potentially have to go through, their immune system is always going to be their first, their best bet, right? It’s intelligently designed to handle everything in the body. Repair, recover, rebuild, regulate, renew, rebalance, everything that’s happening inside of the body.

So especially therapeutic dogs or dogs that are trained to do jobs where they have to focus and they have to have stamina and endurance. And we, we have spent a lot of time and resources training them. It’s very important that we’re not only keeping them with us longer, but that they actually have a good quality of life during those years. And so that’s why we say every pet, every person, every day should be getting this coriolis versicolor mushroom into their system. We’ve been so blessed. God has given us a really pure and potent strain of this mushroom and we’ve perfected the extraction process.

So that’s why we’re seeing such positive results relatively quickly from anything that you can think of with dogs, cats, horses, even People, it’s just been absolutely amazing. And we, we just want to be good stewards with what we’ve been given and take good care of it and be a part of restoring creation. So especially in those conditions, we encourage you to get your pet on the Coriolis versus the color mushroom. Or if you’re a veteran yourself and maybe you’ve been through some trauma and your body’s been through a lot, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, physically, let’s get this mushroom into your system so that you can get that support that you need to really be able to recover from the inside out.

Well, and it makes a lot of sense to me, right? I mean, let’s get our immune systems working as our creator intended it to, instead of feeding it all this other junk and who, God knows what they give us in pill form and our food and all that other stuff these days. So this is actually a very refreshing conversation that we’re having because it doesn’t seem like there’s a whole lot of things out there that are holistic and are natural to help us feel better. Explain to us, we got a couple minutes left. Why pet club 24 7? Why.

Why is it. Why is it put out as a club? I think that this is an important thing to touch on. Yeah, it was really important to us. You know, we feel very called to do what we’re doing and we know that we’re able to offer, offer the world a gift. And so we never really wanted to build a company. We want to build a community. That’s the idea behind it, is that if we stand up together and lock arms, change the way that we’re doing things so that we can get different results and educate each other, make each other aware, connect each other with better solutions and better options that are going to give us better results and that are a lot more affordable in many cases.

You know, we believe that, that this, this community can truly change the way that pets and people are being treated just by being a voice for those that don’t have one. So that’s why the, the name of the company is Pet Club 247 is because we want to be a community of people that are solution, solution oriented, that do something about it, that don’t wait for other people to fix our problems or solve what’s going on, that we just stand up, control what we can control, and contribute how we can contribute through this community. That’s beautiful.

See, folks, here at the Stu Peters Network, we’re here to, to help you feel better. We’re so thankful that you guys are here. Pet Club 24 7, Kurt and Christine, we’re very happy to have you. Thank you for everything that you’ve done bringing this stuff out to people. Let’s get, let’s get healthy again. What was the movement that you talked about, Kurt? I said, you know, we have the Maha movement. Yes. We also have it here for our animals. Make animals healthy again. Absolutely. We’re fight to do so just like on the human side. And people can count on the fact that there’s no bad ingredients in our products.

Everything made in human grade whole food commercial kitchens, all sourced from the US and made right here in the US Very important. Well, Kurt, Kristen, thank you very much for being here, folks. Pet Club 24 7, make sure you get there, get your, get your supplies of mushrooms. Not just for you, but for your pets. Dog, cats, horses, all those things. Pet Club 247 guys, thank you very much for being here. Let’s connect soon. I’m going to get my supply and I’m going to report back for me and Gus to make sure that we, we do this full circle conversation.

I’m super excited to talk to you guys again. We’ll see you very soon. Thank you. Thank you, Richard. All right, Bye bye. There’s nothing we wouldn’t do for our pets. They’re like our children. Our friends at Pet Club 247 have developed natural products that contain the most potent strain of a mushroom that’s been used for thousands of years to help support the immune system. So visit their website today to discover how they’re changing the way that pets and their parents are being treated for the better, better, better, better.
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