Tom Philpott has covered the military for more than 30 years. His syndicated column, Military Update, reaches 2 million readers and focuses on breaking news affecting pay, benefits, and the lifestyle of service people. He is a contributing editor with Military Officer, and his freelance articles have appeared in numerous magazines including The New Yorker, Washingtonian, Readers' Digest, and Kiplinger's. Philpott served a tour in the U.S. Coast Guard as an information officer.
fter some start-up challenges, here's what servicemembers like about the new system.
Concerned Veterans for America, a group of policy advocates funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, who want to shrink the size of federal bureaucracies including the Department of Veterans Affairs, appears to have won a major victory with President Trump’s firing of Dr. David Shulkin as VA secretary.
Rep. Phil Roe (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, returned from a recent visit to Fairchild Air Force Base, Wash., alarmed that the Department of Veterans Affairs might have made a bad decision last June to replace its legacy electronic health record system, VistA, with the same commercial off-the-shelf system that the military is adopting, starting with Pacific Northwest bases.