By Arnold Ahlert ——Bio and Archives--May 26, 2014
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And I don't want to get ahead of the IG report or the other investigations that are being done. And I think it is important to recognize that the wait times generally--what the IG indicated so far, at least, is the wait times were folks who may have had chronic conditions, were seeking their next appointment, but may have already received service. It was not necessarily a situation where they were calling for emergency services. And the IG indicated that he did not see a link between the wait and them actually dying. That does not excuse the fact that the wait times in general are too long in some facilities. And so what we have to do is find out what exactly happened.Really? Shortly after the 2008 election, VA officials warned the Obama-Biden transition team about VA failures regarding waiting times and appointment scheduling. "This is not only a data integrity issue in which [Veterans health Administration] reports unreliable performance data; it affects quality of care by delaying--and potentially denying--deserving veterans timely care," the officials wrote. In 2010, an internal VA memo revealed that officials again warned of "inappropriate scheduling practices" to cover up excessive waiting times for veterans seeking appointments. Even more telling, the VA has already admitted that the deaths of 23 veterans were linked to delays in endoscopy screenings looking for possible gastrointestinal cancer in 76 patients. Twenty-seven different VA hospitals were involved, the worst offender being William Jennings Bryan Dorn veterans hospital in Columbia, S.C. Delays in screenings for 20 patients resulted in six deaths.
have Debra A. Draper, the director of the Health Care Government Accountability Office, conduct an anonymous electronic survey of primary care providers, nurses and clerks at every V.A. hospital and clinic across the nation to find out what they think the real new and returning patient waiting times are. Then her team should give the hospital administrators a one-week amnesty period to report their own version of the waiting times. If the numbers match, then you have reliable data. If they don't, then send the inspector general out to audit them. If the hospital administrators have fudged their data, fire them and prosecute them to the maximum extent under the law.Unfortunately, he suspects that idea will go nowhere. "Any scandal that befalls the V.A. necessarily lands on the party that is in the White House," he explains. "As this is an election year, we can expect that there will be significant pushback to delay and limit the discovery of negative information--which is why I expect my suggestions to be vehemently opposed by the White House and the V.A.'s upper management." Add Senate Democrats to the list. Despite calls for Shinseki's ouster from Republicans and the American Legion, not a single Democratic Senator jumped on the bandwagon. Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Kay Hagan (D-NC), both of whom are in tight reelection races, demanded that "those responsible" be "held accountable," but such generalities are unlikely to mollify veterans and their supporters. In the meantime, the hits keep on coming. At Malcom Randall VA Medical Center in Gainesville, Fl. an audit team discovered a list of veterans awaiting followup appointments being kept on paper instead of in the computer system. Three members of the supervisory staff have been put on paid leave pending the investigation's outcome. At the Huntington VA Medical Center in Charleston, W.Va., a doctor employed from 2008-2010 claimed she was also told to delay appointments. Dr. Margaret Moxness claimed this was done even as she told supervisors they needed immediate care. She alleges two patients committed suicide in the interim. "They don't really experience what the doctors and nurses are experiencing, which is the suffering and the pain and the death," she said. That brings the list of those who have stepped forward to eleven--not counting the 310 submissions as of May 19 to the encrypted website run by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) and the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, who are in the process of soliciting VA "horror stories" from the public, veterans, and VA employees who comprise "less than 10 percent" of those submissions. Yet even 5 percent means another 15 or 16 VA employees may have more insight to offer on the deception and fraud being perpetrated by the VA. On Saturday, the administration did offer one common sense solution to the backlog of appointments, announcing that it will allow veterans to receive more care at outsized facilities. "VA has redoubled efforts to provide quality care to veterans and has taken steps at national and local levels to ensure timely access to care," the department said Saturday in a statement. This then is the current state of affairs on Memorial Day. And while ongoing investigations are warranted, the notion that the president and/or Secretary Shinseki can't begin a massive shakeup of this agency beginning right now is utterly absurd. Equally absurd is the president's "I only learned about this scandal when the public did" excuse. It is the same one he used following revelations about the Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal, and the IRS's unwarranted scrutiny of tax-exempt conservative groups, and it grows as stale as it does incredulous. It is more than a little ironic that the VA's failure to see veterans in a timely manner is exactly the wait-and-see attitude embraced by the president and the VA Secretary. Perhaps both men should be asked how many more veterans will experience "the suffering and the pain and the death" such bureaucratic torpor produces in the interim. It is a question that hangs over this Memorial Day like a shroud.
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Arnold Ahlert was an op-ed columist with the NY Post for eight years.