Bipartisan Kick in the Keister:

It took a joint letter from Senate Veterans Committee Chairman Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) and ranking member Larry Craig (R-Idaho) to get DOD bureaucrats to renew Veterans Affairs physician access to a key military patient database, according to a Feb. 16 statement from Akaka and Craig. The Pentagon set up joint access last September for the Joint Patient Tracking Application, and then suspended access several weeks ago as DOD and VA haggled over further sharing of patient information. Craig called the affair “a bureaucratic legal snafu.”