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VA Lied To Congress About Veteran Deaths and Wait Times

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Kevin Lamarque

Photo Credit: REUTERS / Kevin Lamarque

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) misled Congress on the number of veteran deaths in its health care system, adding to a growing list of untruths that VA has told congressmen trying to investigate the scandal-plagued department.

The House Committee on Veterans Affairs, chaired by Republican Rep. Jeff Miller, is the latest victim of VA’s dishonesty.

VA provided the committee an April 7, 2014 fact sheet purporting to show all of the cases of delays and preventable veteran deaths it oversaw in its gastrointestinal care in the last fifteen years.

“As a result of the consult delay issue VA discovered at two of our medical centers, VHA continues to conduct a national review of consults across the system, which includes a review of all consults since 1999,” according to the fact sheet.

“During this review, VA looked at all open since 1999 to ensure that proper care has been administered to patients. Within this time frame over a quarter billion consults were requested in VA,” the fact sheet stated.

Read more from this story HERE.

Senate Passes VA Overhaul in 91-3 Vote

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The Senate on Thursday easily adopted a $17 billion bill meant to revamp the troubled Veterans Affairs (VA) Department.

Senators voted 91-3 in favor of a conference agreement that provides $10 billion in funding to pay for veterans to get healthcare at private facilities and another $5 billion to allow the VA to hire more doctors, nurses and other medical staff.

The House backed the proposal in a 420-5 vote on Wednesday. The bill now goes to President Obama for his signature.

“Right now veterans in many parts of this country are on very long waiting lists before they get VA healthcare,” Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said ahead of the vote. “Obviously this is an expensive proposition but it is one we have to address.”

Sanders negotiated the legislative deal with his House counterpart Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.).

Read more from this story HERE.

It’s Not Just the VA: Systemic Weaknesses Plague Government Agencies Across the Board

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Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

Headlines broke in April surrounding an investigative report that revealed 40 veterans had died waiting for appointments at the Pheonix Veterans Affairs Health Care System. Further examination affirmed that this was not a singular instance, but rather a widespread case of bureaucratic corruption.

Between the falsification of waiting lists, the retaliation against whistle blowers, and VA Secretary Eric Shinseki’s resignation, all eyes have been on the VA the past few months. Should it come as a surprise, then, that numerous commissions, GAO investigations, hearings, and IG reports previously spoke to the inefficiencies of the VA? Nothing was done about this deep, institutional problem until it was too late.

Peter Schuck, Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School, has written a book titled “Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better” which chronicles the deep structural flaws that undermine the vast majority of federal agencies. Though the VA is a perfect case study for what he describes in his book, Schuck analyzes a large number of domestic programs and develops criteria for assessing their effectiveness.

At last week’s “Fixing the US Department of Veterans Affairs” panel at the American Enterprise Institute, Schuck outlined several features that contribute to the defective nature of large government service programs:

1. Ever-increasing budgets: In the case of the VA, the budget has doubled in real terms over the past 10 years. Big government agency budget hikes are often driven by demographics and interest group politics.

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Acting VA Head: We Need $17 Billion to Stop Mistreating Veterans

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

In which the agency that’s been giving millions in bonuses to people for causing and lying about the untimely deaths of veterans asks for the GDPs of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Anguilla, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Equatorial Guinea combined from taxpayers to stop doing that. Super:

The Department of Veterans Affairs needs $17.6 billion in additional funds over the next three years to meet patients’ needs and fix the troubled agency’s problems, its acting director said Wednesday.

Testifying for the first time on Capitol Hill, interim VA Secretary Sloan Gibson told the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee that the money would help VA medical centers decrease appointment waiting times and hire more doctors.

You perhaps won’t be surprised to find this request is a-ok with Democrats while Republicans wonder how more money is going to solve this problem when the increasing backlog and problems at the Veterans Administration correlated with a rapidly increasing budget. And, in the case of the aforementioned bonuses, more money actually caused the problems.

Read more from this story HERE.

TheDC Uncovers Another VA Backlog: Months Of Neglected Medical Records

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller The Memphis VA Medical Center has yet another medical records backlog, The Daily Caller has learned — this one estimated at three to five months long.

According to the whistleblower, who provided the photo of this second set of medical records piling up at the Memphis VA Medical Center, the individual responsible for scanning in these records is Carnell Clark, an employee at the facility who is currently busy helping to catch up on a backlog TheDC exposed in June.

Sandra Glover, the spokeswoman for the Veteran Integrated Services Network 9, told TheDC the records are for “Intensive Care Unit (ICU) ‘flow sheets,’ also referred to as ‘work sheets,’ which contain real-time vital sign, input/output, and other pertinent information during the time a patient is in the ICU.” Veteran Integrated Services Network 9 includes the Memphis facility.

According to a March 2014 Office of Special Counsel (OSC) complaint filed by another employee of the Memphis VA, the hospital has known about this problem — and an alleged cover-up — since at least that time.

Read more from this story HERE.

Nurse: VA Medical Staff Stole Morphine From Dying Patients

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Photo Credit: U.S. Air Force / Senior Airman Daniel HughesVials of morphine were systemically stolen from a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center and replaced with water and saline so that dying veterans got the wrong treatments, a longtime VA nurse told The Daily Caller.

“A nurse taking care of hospice patients over the past year had been diverting vials of morphine,” said Valerie Riviello, a 28-year veteran nurse at the Albany Stratton VA Medical Center in Albany, New York. “Those patients that were dying in hospice were not getting their intended pain medication.”

Management became aware of the recurring theft without reporting it to higher levels of governance within the VA system, said Riviello, a Florence Nightingale Award winner for nursing.

The nurse detailed visible abuse of a machine that dispenses medication. Hospital staff need to punch in a code to get medicine from the machine. Vials of morphine were being replaced with other ingredients, including saline and water. Records continued to show the accurate number of withdrawals from the machine, but morphine was not getting to the patients. The abuse was not noticed by management for about a year, according to Riviello.

Albany Stratton VA Medical Center did not return a request for comment for this report.

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This List of Gov’t Bureaucrats Earning More Than $180K Makes The VA Scandal Even More Alarming

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The Office of Personnel Management maintains a list of the amount of civilian workers that each branch of the government has, in addition to their salary amounts. Although it does not mention individuals by name nor their positions, the numbers are quite surprising when the data is adjusted for an annual income of $180,000 or more.

Some facts to consider:

There are 25,356 government agency workers earning $180,000 or more.

18,709 of those workers work at the Department of Veteran Affairs (5% of workforce).

2,355 are at the Department of Health and Human Services (3% of workforce).

1,605 are at the Department of Transportation (3% of workforce).

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Vet Dies Waiting 30 Minutes for Ambulance from Hospital Five Minutes Away

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Photo Credit: APWhile it is just a tragic anecdote, the latest story surrounding the chronic and too often fatal inefficiency of Veterans Affairs hospitals is illustrative of a much larger problem.

“A veteran who collapsed in an Albuquerque Veteran Affairs hospital cafeteria, 500 yards from the emergency room, died after waiting 30 minutes for an ambulance,” the Associated Press reported on Thursday. “Officials at the hospital Thursday confirmed it took a half an hour for the ambulance to be dispatched and take the man from one building to the other, which is about a five minute walk.”

VA spokeswoman Sonja Brown defended the VA’s conduct in this case, telling reporters that the staff “followed policy in calling 911 when the man collapsed on Monday.” She added, however, that this policy is now under review.

It is unclear why the ambulance took so long to reach this veteran in need, and blaming the VA system in this instance may be entirely unfair. That said, it is also just another example that serves to reinforce the narrative that the VA system is hopelessly broken.

And the impression that the VA system is broken is anything but unfair.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Whistleblower Fights Back Against VA Hospital Over Secret Waiting Lists

By Michael Volpe.

Despite denials by the Department of Veteran Affairs, a whistleblower is standing by his claim that a Louisiana VA hospital maintained a secret waiting list for patient care.

According to a hospital employee named Shea Wilkes and internal emails leaked to the media, there have been wait times of up to fifteen months for appointments in the mental health department of the Overton-Brooks VA Medical Center in Shreveport, Louisiana.

Stephanie Alexander, a nurse in the hospital, emailed James Patterson, the department’s chief of staff, and Ruthie McDaniel, the operations manager, to request overtime so that employees could catch up on scheduling the backlog.

“There are multiple lists, excel sheets, papers that contain names of patients that need to be scheduled- just a few at approximately 2400 existing patients- some have not been seen in as long as 12-15 months,” said Alexander in the email.

Wilkes told The Daily Caller that 620 veterans still need appointments.

Read more from this story HERE.

You Guys Are Idiots: VA Finally Offers Veteran An Appointment… Two Years After His Death

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Photo Credit: WNDWhen Suzanne Chase opened the letter from the Department of Veterans Affairs, she says she felt like she was in the twilight zone. The letter invited her husband Doug, a Vietnam vet, to set up an appointment with the local clinic, which he had requested in 2012…

Suzanne told WBZ-TV that, bearing in mind that the letter was 22 months late and forgetting the fact that her husband was dead, the note at the bottom of the letter was simply unbelievable.

At the bottom of the letter, dated June 12, it reads: “We are committed to providing primary care in a timely manner and would greatly appreciate a prompt response.”

“I was like you have to be kidding, right,” Chase recalled.

Read more from this story HERE.

WATCH: VA Scandal Remix Of ‘God Bless The USA’ Is Exactly What The Obama Administration Needs To Hear

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Long wait times and secret lists that result in our nation’s heroes dying before they can get medical care – all while the VA spends hundreds of millions on solar panels – isn’t right, plain and simple. And it’s not going to get better unless we demand that it does.

Read more from this story HERE.