Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. He has been Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, and he spent 15 years working for Congress on national security issues, including stints as an investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office.

VA: Delay, Deny, and Hope That I Die

The VA earned that tongue-in-cheek motto back in 2011 when news reports revealed a backlog of one million veterans waiting for care. The latest scandal involves more than 120 veterans who have died, are dying or have suffered serious injuries waiting for care at VA facilities.

Gretchen Martens says the news doesn't surprise her. Affectionately known as The Veteran Lady, Gretchen is widely respected for her knowledge of today's military transition issues, and she says the scandal should scare every mayor and city manager.

Gretchen Martens has been featured on CBS news and numerous other media outlets. She's the founder and CEO of Homeward Deployed, an organization that works to bridge the gap between the military and Main Street. Her books include "Untying the Yellow Ribbon: Transforming How Veterans and Communities Thrive."

In 2006, at the age of 8, Madison drew an outline of a flip flop on paper and added her sea characters. She took the drawings to her dad and said, "Look dad, FishFlops!"

FishFlops first appeared in trade shows in 2010. Madison's first big break came when she wrote a letter to a buyer at Nordstrom, the up-scale fashion retailer. Nordstrom placed their first order and FishFlops hit 64 Nordstrom stores in July of 2012. Soon afterwards, Madison was featured in local publications and television news stories.

In June 2013, Yahoo featured Madison's story on the front page of its website. The story was read by millions of people and started an "email avalanche" of interested buyers, distributors and the general public. FishFlops immediately sold out at Nordstrom and every other retailer who had purchased them.

Today, at 16, Madison has taken her business to a new level. As she completes her sophomore year in high school, she has sold more than 100,000 pairs of her colorful sea-creature flip-flops for kids, which retail for between $20 and $32 in Nordstrom and other stores. She has introduced a line of wedges and cork-soled sandals for women. And this spring she launched the tweens clothing brand, Madison Nicole, in Saks Fifth Avenue and 120 U.S. boutiques.

The Houston Chronicle named her first on its 2014 Most Fascinating People list, ahead of the city's star athletes, rappers, politicians, and activists. Junior Achievement of Southeast Texas asked her to speak about her experience to 8,000 students last month.

Two middle-school textbook publishers will include Robinson's story in some 1 million volumes for U.S. and Canadian students. Hundreds of would-be entrepreneurs of all ages from around the world have written letters and emails congratulating her or asking for her advice.

Gregg Stebben is a tech editor for Men's Health Magazine.

VA: Delay, Deny, and Hope That I Die

The VA earned that tongue-in-cheek motto back in 2011 when news reports revealed a backlog of one million veterans waiting for care. The latest scandal involves more than 120 veterans who have died, are dying or have suffered serious injuries waiting for care at VA facilities.

Gretchen Martens says the news doesn't surprise her. Affectionately known as The Veteran Lady, Gretchen is widely respected for her knowledge of today's military transition issues, and she says the scandal should scare every mayor and city manager.

Gretchen Martens has been featured on CBS news and numerous other media outlets. She's the founder and CEO of Homeward Deployed, an organization that works to bridge the gap between the military and Main Street. Her books include "Untying the Yellow Ribbon: Transforming How Veterans and Communities Thrive."

David Balto has over 15 years of government antitrust experience as a trial attorney in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice and in several senior level positions at the Federal Trade Commission.

He was the Policy Director of the Bureau of Competition of the Federal Trade Commission (1998-2001) and attorney advisor to Chairman Robert Pitofsky (1995-1997). In these positions, he was a senior advisor in all aspects of the FTC's merger and non- merger enforcement program. He helped litigate the challenges to the Staples/Office Depot, Drug Wholesalers, and Heinz/Beechnut mergers, the Intel monopolization case, and the challenges to anticompetitive conduct by several pharmaceutical companies.

David frequently represents consumer groups in opposing mergers.

Gregg Stebben is a tech editor for Men's Health Magazine.

Jacob Gadd was appointed deputy director of The American Legion's Veteran Affairs & Rehabilitation Division in June, 2010. He is responsible for overseeing five national field service representatives who conduct site visits at VA medical centers nationwide as part of the Legion's System Worth Saving program.

The American Legion demands accountability at every level of the Department of Veterans Affairs after a report that no fewer than 40 veterans died waiting for long-delayed doctor appointments at the Phoenix VA Medical Center. Their names were reportedly kept on a so-called "secret list" that misrepresented the hospital's performance on patient waiting times. This report is the most recent in a succession of preventable death allegations at VA facilities nationwide. In some cases, facility executive leaders received year-end performance bonuses despite the preventable deaths, and now the issue has boiled to the top of the nation's conscience.

On May 5, American Legion National Commander Daniel M. Dellinger called for the resignations of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki and two of his deputies, Robert Petzel, undersecretary for health, and Allison Hickey, undersecretary for benefits. Verna Jones, director of the American Legion's Veterans Affairs and Rehabilitation Division is available to you and your listeners on Wednesday, May 21st to talk about this issue and the Legion's recent visit to Phoenix, which included a May 13 town hall meeting for local veterans to discuss the quality of their health care. The Legion has made similar site visits and evaluations of health-care quality at VA medical centers in several cities across the country since last September.

NAOMI LOPEZ BAUMAN is director of health care policy at the Illinois Policy Institute. In an op-ed syndicated story that appeared nationally last week, she wrote that "American taxpayers paid huge sums of money for the "acquisition" of the reported 8 million ObamaCare enrollees." That the President recently boasted about.

She arrived at her conclusion by adding together the amount of money the states received from Washington for "outreach" and marketing and for creating state-based exchange web sites. If the state chose not to create its own web site, she calculated its share of the tab for the federal web site.

Naomi found that taxpayers are spending between $730-$1100 in customer "acquisition" costs to get a single person enrolled in an ObamaCare plan. In Hawaii, getting a single person enrolled cost taxpayers over $23,000.

By comparison, the average customer acquisition cost for Priceline.com is around $7 and BarnesandNoble.com is about $10.

TOM PARSONS is CEO and founder of Bestfares.com, a discount travel website that tracks airfare changes and travel industry trends. Tom is one of the most sought-after travel industry experts in the United States. Parsons has been chasing down hidden travel bargains and bringing them to the traveling public for more than 32 years.