Published: May 30, 2008 03:48 pm      

Ackerson critical of Buyer's military healthcare amendment

A recently approved House Bill amendment drafted by Congressman Steve Buyer (R-4th District) is drawing criticism from Buyer’s Democratic challenger in the upcoming November election.

Nels Ackerson, a Zionsville attorney running against Buyer in the November election, accuses Buyer of grandstanding in an election year and maintains that the congressman “took the lead in proposing an unprecedented tax on veterans to pay for their healthcare.”

Those claims come amidst a new press release from Buyer’s office crediting the Congressman’s amendment for an increase in healthcare and readiness of the nation’s active and inactive troops.

Buyer’s proposed amendment was attached to the Duncan Hunter National Defense Authorization Act and calls for an increase in dental readiness funding to $22.3 million and $8.5 million for demobilization of reserve components during the 2009 fiscal year.

His office says that poor dental health among Army Reservists and those in the National Guard has become a growing problem for the Department of Defense which has been forced in some cases to declare personnel unfit for deployment.

Officials from the DOD did not return telephone calls seeking comment on the issue.

Ackerson maintains that the new amendment does not erase what he characterized as an era of unprecedented increases in the taxation of military veterans.

“Mr. Buyer’s cuts in veterans’ health benefits have been painful and I don’t begrudge a small step but we need to look at the whole package and so far that package has been dismal,” Ackerson said. “He has a record of very substantial cuts to veterans’ benefits over his years in Congress and he has occasionally come back to make some smaller increases in military benefits and this seems to follow that pattern.”

Buyer refuted those comments and characterized Ackerson’s allegations as “intellectually dishonest.”

“It’s a false and malicious statement,” Buyer said. “There is no such thing as a tax on veterans’ healthcare. This is a gentleman who got out of Purdue in 1967 and while his buddies went off to serve in Vietnam he served his time as a lawyer in Washington, D.C., so he does know how to spin things.”

Ackerson cited a 2006 editorial authored by American Legion National Commander Thomas Bock in which Bock characterized Buyer’s VA budget as “out of sync with the entire veterans’ community.” The editorial goes on to cite the need for allocation of $1.5 billion in emergency spending funds for the VA.

Buyer was chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee during that time and maintains that he was the one who discovered the shortfall.

“There were no problems with the model itself,” he said. “It’s that the inputs that the VA were putting into the budget were stale and not up to date. It didn’t take into account the individuals who were accessing the VA system and the reason we opened up the VA to returning veterans is that I did not want to recreate what happened after the first Gulf War ... Those numbers weren’t appropriately taken into account and that very same day we went to the leadership and got the number changed.”

Buyer’s office released a 10-page document to the Hendricks County Flyer highlighting the Congressman’s major military accomplishments dating back to 1994.

He cited congressional legislation stemming from the Veterans’ Affairs Committee that had increased the veterans’ budget by 18 percent as well as an additional 16 percent increase in military healthcare benefits.

“The two years that I chaired that committee we increased the budget by $12 billion, so for anyone to call that a cut is intellectually dishonest,” Buyer said. “There’s no such thing as a tax on veterans’ healthcare.”

brian.kern@flyergroup.com