Category Archives: Veterans Affairs

Malfeasance

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It’s rampant at the Veterans Administration. And “leadership” there and in the White House plainly don’t care, as their decision to be inactive demonstrates. Here are some examples, from The Wall Street Journal.

  • After the biggest scandal in VA history, in which 110 VA medical facilities across the country maintained secret lists to hide long waits for care, only three low-level VA employees have been fired for wait-time manipulation.
  • In September the VA’s Office of Inspector General revealed that two VA senior executives inappropriately used their authority to game the agency’s hiring system, allowing them to benefit from more than $400,000 in taxpayer-funded relocation expenses. [The VA reassigned them at their existing salary rather than terminating them for cause.]
  • In December the public learned of two internal VA investigations that found whistleblowers at the Phoenix VA Hospital were retaliated against by two senior managers…. More than a year after…the VA has refused to hold them accountable.

Robert McDonald, VA Secretary, promised to fix this sort of thing when he was handed the job 16 months ago. These failures are demonstrations of his decision not to rock the boat. That his decisions have been allowed to stand unchallenged are clear demonstrations of President Barrack Obama’s lack of concern for the welfare of our veterans.

veteranos administratio delende est

Why Aren’t They

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…fired for cause?

The Department of Veterans Affairs said Friday two high-ranking officials were finally demoted in response to a federal probe that found they manipulated the agency’s personnel system for their own gain, but a key lawmaker is asking why they weren’t prosecuted.

The two high-ranking officials are Diana Rubens, director of VBA’s Philadelphia regional office, and Kimberly Graves, director of VBA’s St Paul regional office. The behavior of these two women (I won’t call them “ladies;” their behavior has established what they are, and they’ve already named their price) warrants termination for cause.

Congressman Jeff Miller’s (R, FL) question—he’s the “key lawmaker”—is an entirely valid one, too. Their behavior seems criminal enough to warrant that type of investigation, too.

And my own question: what has taken the VA so long to do even this trivial hand-slap? Even the original October move (allegedly having to be redone due to “administrative error”) was far too slow in coming. What’s the VA’s excuse [sic] here?

Veteranos administratio delende est

Democrats and the VA

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I’ve written a number of times about the Veterans Administration and the need to get rid of this dysfunctional government entity.

Now we get Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton doubling down on this failed VA and on her desire to expand Big Government further and to extend crony capitalism to a new arena.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is offering her vision for veterans’ health care, promising to fight full-fledged privatization while proposing the government contract with private providers for a range of health services.

Government has shown its incompetence in matters of health (among others), so her answer—the typical Progressive Democrat answer—is to have more of it. Crony capitalism has shown its profitability for politicians of any stripe, so this Progress Democrat wants more of that pie for herself. She wants Big Government to stay involved in the health care of our nation’s veterans, but she wants to shift that involvement to the health providers her administration will favor.

This would be foolishness if it weren’t dishonesty.

Veteranos administratio delende est.

An Excerpt

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…from a VA Office of the Inspector General report.

We substantiated the second allegation that pending ES [Enrollment System] records included entries for individuals reported to be deceased. As of September 2014, more than 307,000 pending ES records, or about 35 percent of all pending records, were for individuals reported as deceased by the Social Security Administration. However, due to data limitations, we could not determine specifically how many pending ES records represent veterans who applied for health care benefits. These conditions occurred because the enrollment program did not effectively define, collect, and manage enrollment data. In addition, VHA lacked adequate procedures to identify date of death information and implement necessary updates to the individual’s status. Unless VHA officials establish effective procedures to identify deceased individuals and accurately update their status, ES will continue to provide unreliable information on the status of applications for veterans seeking enrollment in the VA health care system.

Not only is the VA not trying to take care of our vets—307,000 of them died waiting to get treatment—they’re not even troubling themselves to keep records.

We substantiated the third allegation that employees incorrectly marked unprocessed applications as completed and possibly deleted 10,000 or more transactions from the Workload Reporting and Productivity (WRAP) tool over the past 5 years.

They do, though, go to the effort of covering up their non-performance (I hesitate to say “failure to perform;” that would suggest they’re trying).

And there’s this insulting bit of vapidity from the Under Secretary for Health in response to the IG’s report (the whole letter is at Appendix D of the report at the link. It doesn’t get any better).

We regret the inconvenience and potential hardship place on applicants for health care and we are working hard to restore Veterans’ confidence and trust in VA’s systems and staff. We have and will continue to take timely and appropriate steps to improve our services to ensure we meet the expectations of those whom we have the honor of serving.

Yeah, dying while on the VA’s who gives a patootie wait list is such a potentially inconvenient hardship.

Since the VA doesn’t care, we should honor their lack of interest. Disband the VA, and use the budget dollars that would have gone to the VA in any particular year as vouchers for our veterans which they can find, in that year, their own quality care and decent hospitals.

Another Fine VA Mess

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And another reason to disband the thing and send its budget as health care vouchers to our veterans.

A VA employee tossed files containing the Social Security numbers and other personal information of 1,100 patients of a South Dakota VA hospital into a dumpster, where they sat for two days before they were discovered and recovered. This happened last May, but the VA chose not to tell anyone, like those patients, about it until the end of July.

Mistakes happen, even egregious things like this. What’s unacceptable is the decision by this VA hospital, condoned by the VA itself (if only through its own inaction and silence) to withhold information about this breach from the breach’s victims for so long.

That decision is part of a too-long standing pattern of VA malfeasance and VA decisions to do nothing about themselves.