Jake Tapper Hammers White House Chief of Staff: How Many Dead Vets Do You Need?
By Mike Miller.
CNN’s Jake Tapper went hard at White House Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough Thursday over the VA scandal that has seen delayed treatment and preventable deaths at VA facilities across the nation.
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Photo Credit: Getty Senators Lose Patience With ‘Out-of-Touch’ Shinseki
By Newsmax Wires.
New complaints about long wait lists and falsified patient appointment reports have surfaced at Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics across the country, the department’s internal watchdog said Thursday, but he said there’s no proof so far that delays in treatment have caused any patient’s death.
VA Secretary Eric Shinseki said he was “mad as hell” about allegations of severe problems and said he was looking for quick results from a nationwide audit. He rejected calls for him to resign and a senator’s suggestion that he call in the FBI to investigate.
At a sometimes-combative congressional hearing, Richard Griffin, the department’s acting inspector general, said that after an initial review of 17 people who died while awaiting appointments at the Phoenix VA hospital, none of the deaths appeared to have been caused by delays in treatment.
“It’s one thing to be on a waiting list, and it’s another thing to conclude that as a result of being on the waiting list that’s the cause of death, depending on what your illness might have been at the beginning,” Griffin told the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee.
Griffin said his office is working off several lists of patients at the giant Phoenix facility, which treats more than 80,000 veterans a year. He said a widely reported list of 40 patients who died while awaiting appointments “does not represent the total number of veterans that we’re looking at.”
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Photo Credit: APSex Change For Manning As Vets Die From VA Neglect
IBD Editorial.
Abuse: The Pentagon tries to transfer convicted national security leaker Bradley Manning to a civilian prison to treat a gender disorder while veterans suffer and die waiting in vain on phony Veterans Administration lists.
Or should we say Pvt. Chelsea Manning, the name chosen by the convicted leaker of sensitive classified documents to anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. Manning has asked for hormone therapy and to be able to live as a woman and the Pentagon is trying to help.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel last month gave the Army approval to try to work out a transfer plan with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which, unlike the Defense Department, does provide such treatment to inmates, two Pentagon officials not authorized to speak on the record told the CBS affiliate in Washington, D.C.
The name change from Bradley to Chelsea was approved last month by a Leavenworth County District Judge, a request the Pentagon did not oppose.
Manning has been diagnosed by military doctors multiple times, including last fall after arriving at the Fort Leavenworth, Kan., prison,with gender dysphoria, the sense of being a woman in a man’s body.
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