Dean Heller has a crazy plan to take away veterans' health care and Medicaid, give them snake oil
newsdepo.com
Nevada Republican Sen. Dean Heller has some crazy ideas about health care. This is the weirdest. He wants the Veterans Affairs hospitals to adopt unproven experimental mental health treatments on the basis of the company that markets them being friends with hDean Heller has a crazy plan to take away veterans' health care and Medicaid, give them snake oil
Nevada Republican Sen. Dean Heller has some crazy ideas about health care. This is the weirdest. He wants the Veterans Affairs hospitals to adopt unproven experimental mental health treatments on the basis of the company that markets them being friends with his chief staffers. And a campaign donation. The company is called CereCare and the treatment consists of using «electrical scans of the brain and heart to detect a patient's 'intrinsic brainwave frequency' and find 'the area of the brain in need of restoration,'» and then using that data to send electromagnetic pulses to that area of the brain using a machine called a transcranial magnetic stimulator. The senior aide in Heller's office in Reno is Glenna Smith. Two of CereCare's partners have a business connection to Smith and «We’ve known her for years,» said one of those partners, Nino Pedrini. «This was Glenna reaching out to us, knowing what we were doing, saying we think there’s a fit here where you folks can help our veterans,» he said. Heller co-sponsored a bill directing the VA to start a pilot program in this procedure, and that bill was drafted in part by another CereCare partner, Judi Kosterman. She describes herself as the company's expert on the procedure and is identified as Dr. Judi Kosterman on her business card. «She is not a physician and her doctorate is in education, according to official records.» So that's nice. By the way, another partner in the business, Walter A. «Del» Marting, donated $500 to Heller's re-election campaign a couple of years ago. Heller himself, according to Marting, wanted the VA to pay for the pilot program, although a local veterans nonprofit group was offering to cover the costs for four veterans to try the treatment. The VA would have to swallow those costs because Heller's bill did not provide any funding for it. Meaning that the VA would have had to take money from existing treatments that are already proven to be effective for treating addiction and post-traumatic stress. This did not go over well with all veterans' groups, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars. «The VFW believes that VA must spend its already scarce health care resources on therapies that have shown promise or have a proven track record,» the VFW told Congress. The bill hasn't progressed. Meanwhile, Heller is also cosponsoring an «Obamacare replacement» plan that would gut Medicaid, and cut tens of thousands of Nevadans out of the program. As of 2015, there were some 18,000 veterans in Nevada who get their medical care—including mental health and substance abuse treatment—through Medicaid. That's true in a many states. Only about 40 percent of veterans are actually enrolled for coverage with the VA and not all enrolled veterans can easily use their services because they don't live near a VA provider. Nationally, about 1 in 10 veterans relies on Medicaid, either on its own or as a supplement to VA coverage. Heller's trying to take away proven, effective treatment for veterans in two ways—with his unproven «brain wave» therapy and by gutting Medicaid. He's doing this to veterans in his own state, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Nevadans who rely on Medicaid. Heller has got to go for everyone's health. Please contribute $3 to Jackie Rosen to flip this seat. Read more