This Is Absolutely Inexcusable...

[Econoline]

OOPS. Duplicate post deleted.

[Econoline]

Good analysis here. (My emphasis.)

In truth, there’s no way to know if Shinseki’s management style had anything to do with the wait list problems. But there is evidence that these problems were around before him, and further evidence that one of the major problems is funding. Funding comes from Congress. Thus, two of the biggest reasons why accepting Shinseki’s resignation was a mistake are:

1) The problem has a much smaller chance of being honestly addressed now, as there is no pressure on Republicans to finally fund the VA.

The most important consequence of accepting Shinseki’s resignation is that it suggests the problem rested with him and allows craven politicians to kick the problem down the road. He resigned because he seems to be one of the few who actually put the VA first; he didn’t want to be a distraction to getting the issues resolved. But in fact, by accepting his resignation, Democrats have allowed Republicans to take refuge in blaming him and President Obama. Prior to this, Speaker John Boehner knew better than to blame Shinseki, as he did not want to leave his party vulnerable to the inevitable scrutiny over their consistent failure to support veterans legislatively. But after the resignation, Boehner was preening with blame.

This means that Republicans (and thus the media) will soon alternate between forgetting about the VA delays and blaming Obama for them. Neither of these two will solve the problem.

As long as Shinseki was in office and Republicans (and some Democrats) were calling for him to resign, the issue was getting notice. Republicans viewed it as a political opportunity, and missed the very thing Boehner was smart enough to see. It was a short lived “opportunity” that would backfire. Just as it was beginning to backfire, and the country’s attention was finally being drawn to the real issue of the unsustainable cost of a failure to budget two wars, Democrats caved.

2) This is also a lost political chance for Democrats.

Yes, it’s an election year, and that’s why some Democrats caved and those running for election were first out of the gate calling for Shinseki’s resignation, as if that would do anything but take away a current attack of Republicans. But it was foolish. Republicans were far more vulnerable on the issue than Democrats.

Republicans are the party who voted against veterans and expanding the funding to the VA. They are the party that gave the President 2 billion a year less than he asked for in his VA budget. Republicans were vulnerable on this, and they deserved to be taken to task for it. Not only would this have given Democrats something to campaign on, but it would have actually been a part of doing the right thing. A win win, politically speaking.

Now that Shinseki is gone and Republicans got a whiff of how this scandal was going to land in their laps, we will probably not hear much of it. After all, Democrats and Independent Bernie Sanders have been trying to get veterans’ legislation passed and they have been screaming to anyone who would listen for years. No one cared.

Finally the public cared. The media cared. This was an opportunity to have this dialogue about the real cost of wars and what it means when someone claims to “support the troops”. You see, after they are troops, they are veterans. Democrats are legislatively the party that supports the veterans. This matters, because it is the honorable thing to do.

Shinseki is a courageous man, who stood up to the Bush administration upon their invasion of Iraq. He is also a disabled veteran. The notion that he somehow didn’t care about veterans is totally preposterous. He has a track record of integrity.

So Democrats allowed another good person to be pushed out of service by Republican howls. If Democrats think this was a sacrifice necessary to get about fixing the VA, they don’t understand this media or Republican Party. No one will care once Republicans stop howling. It will be all about Obama now, and that is nothing but a huge distraction. Republicans will paint the resignation as a sign of guilt and use it against vulnerable Democrats across the country.

Republicans don’t care about fixing the VA. They only wanted to use this problem for political football. Democrats should have let them. It was a game Republicans were destined to lose.

[BoSoxGal]

the VA is rife with corruption and incompetence, (pretty much like just about every other government run operation)

I just caught this after taking the time to read the whole thread.

I guess I just feel the need to say, after 25 years working in private and public settings, that this descriptor applies to both equally.

Corruption and incompetence are human characteristics that some folks exhibit in spades, and some of those folks work in the banking industry, while some of those folks work in government - and everywhere in between.

It's very disingenuous to level this accusation against government entities without acknowledging that it happens everywhere else, too. Some people really suck - they're lazy, greedy, and self-interested - with some percentage taking the latter quality to a psychopathological level. That's life.

Rooting out this behavior is a admirable goal and I agree that all best efforts should go toward that - but as someone who has attempted to do so on a local level for the past 21 months and has suffered the backlash of folks who like their nepotism, cronyism, laziness, etc. - it's no easy task.

General Shinseki deserved a chance, having only just found out about the problem. That isn't his fault - the managers at fault went to great lengths to hide this scheme from top leadership, as well as the public.

This is no different than all the horrific corruption in the banking industry that ruined the economy - and still nobody is in jail, or even on trial. I bet we'll see trials of the VA officials who carried out these schemes.

[Lord Jim]

So Econo, your central point is that bureaucrats shamefully hiding the waiting lists, (and not even putting others on waiting lists) which led to the deaths of folks who put their lives on the line for this country, in order to line their pockets is the fault not of the venal and despicable bureaucrats who did it, but rather the fault of the Republican Congress?

Well, I'll give you high marks for creativity anyway. (Not quite as creative as Rube's assertion that the Oklahoma Bombing was Ronald Reagan's fault, but not bad...)

Re VA Funding, I'll see your article and raise you a chart:



And they're so incompetent, they can't even figure out how to spend the money they have:

VA expects to have more medical-care funding than it can spend for the fifth year in a row

The Obama administration’s Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) expects to have more money for medical care than it can spend for the fifth fiscal year in a row, The Daily Caller has learned.

Republican lawmakers and veteran groups are currently calling for the resignation of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki over secret waiting lists kept at the Phoenix VA Medical Center that led to preventable veteran deaths.

Despite liberal claims that VA needs more funding, based on a report from the labor union the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) that VA is underfunded, the scandal-plagued department actually has a surplus in medical-care funding.

VA expects to carry over $450 million in medical-care funding from fiscal year 2014 to fiscal year 2015. VA received its full requested medical care appropriation of $54.6 billion this fiscal year, which is more than $10 billion more than it received four years ago.

This is part of an ongoing trend.

VA carried over $1.449 billion in medical-care funding from fiscal year 2010 to 2011, $1.163 billion from fiscal year 2011 to fiscal year 2012, $637 million from fiscal year 2012 to 2013, and $543 million from fiscal year 2013 to 2014.

The Daily Caller reported that VA spent more than $3.5 million on furniture the night before the government shutdown on the last day of fiscal year 2013 so as not to lose that money in the department’s budget the next fiscal year.

(Wow, bureaucrats so incompetent they can't even figure out how to spend money; that's really sad. Kinda like a sailor who can't figure out what to do in a whore house.)

It's not like Obama didn't know the depth of the problems at the VA. Hell, he even ran on them:

"When 400,000 veterans are stuck on a waiting list for claims, we need a new sense of urgency," said Sen Obama in 07: http://t.co/HlayjGUWsd

And:

Veterans Affairs officials warned the Obama-Biden transition team in the weeks after the 2008 presidential election that the department shouldn’t trust the wait times that its facilities were reporting.

“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 particular, the 2008 transition report referred to a VA inspector general recommendation to test the accuracy of reported waiting times…

“Audits of outpatient scheduling and patient waiting times completed since 2005 have identified noncompliance with the policies and procedures for scheduling, inaccurate reporting of patient waiting times and errors in [electronic waiting lists],” the briefing papers state…

The briefing materials do not reveal any concerns about outright fraud in manipulating waiting times, but they make repeated references in summarizing past audits and reviews about data accuracy.

So they've known there are serious problems, and then a guy gets appointed who for five years (I really don't think that can be over emphasized, so I'll repeat it again; FIVE YEARS )has his subordinates lying to his face and blatantly ignoring his instructions, and in all that time he never catches on or has their claims verified independently.

(Call me cynical, but I really have a hard time believing that you would be quite so patient and understanding if this blatant incompetence were going on in a Republican administration... )

With the report I quoted above in hand, why on earth didn't Shinseki order an independent investigation of wait time claims on day one? Or even day one thousand for that matter...

There's a bill fast tracking it's way though Congress that would make it much easier for the VA Secretary to fire these no good bastards. That bill needs to be passed and signed into law post haste, and a VA secretary needs to be appointed who will seize that authority and lay on with a will.

We need a VA secretary who will be relentless in rooting out malfeasance and misfeasance in the department, not one who when his subordinates piss on him and tell him it's raining just opens his umbrella.

There's another bill that would make it much easier for any Vet with more than a 30 day wait to go into the private health sector for treatment, (and have the VA pay) I'd make it two weeks rather than 30 days, but it's a step in the right direction. That bill needs to be signed into law immediately.

These two pieces of legislation, combined with the appointment of a VA secretary with his head in the game, will be an excellent start in straightening out the department, and improving the care our veterans receive.

[Lord Jim]

Corruption and incompetence are human characteristics that some folks exhibit in spades, and some of those folks work in the banking industry, while some of those folks work in government - and everywhere in between.

I certainly would never dispute that BSG, (and of course it was idiotic to put in place a bonus structure which encouraged dishonesty and put lives at risk) but the difference is that in the private sector they're not doing it with my (and your) money.

[Econoline]

Well, we'll just have to see what happens now. I can't help but incline toward the pessimist's view (expressed in that article I posted) that now that they've gotten rid of Shinseki the Republicans in Congress will declare victory and go home. Wanna bet on how much real reform gets accomplished between now and November? Or between now and a year from now?

As for the chart, when I read things like this...

For the sixth year in a row, VA hospitals last year scored higher than private facilities on the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index... Males 65 years and older receiving VA care had about a 40% lower risk of death than those enrolled in Medicare Advantage, whose care is provided through private health plans or HMOs... Harvard University just gave the VA its Innovations in American Government Award for the agency's work in computerizing patient records.

And all that was achieved at a relatively low cost. In the past 10 years, the number of veterans receiving treatment from the VA has more than doubled, from 2.5 million to 5.3 million, but the agency has cared for them with 10,000 fewer employees. The VA's cost per patient has remained steady during the past 10 years. The cost of private care has jumped about 40% in that same period.

...or this...

Since President Obama became president, the VA budget has climbed 50 percent from $100 billion to $150 billion. While that may seem adequate to the austerity mongers, those eligible for veterans' benefits more than doubled from 400,000 to 918,000 in the same period.

...I have to think that it doesn't tell the whole story. (Sorry, I couldn't find these facts in the form of a chart or a graph. )

Certainly money isn't the whole problem at the VA, but I have to think it's at least part of the problem. The only conceivable reason for delays in appointments is lack of adequate personnel, and how could that not be related to the budget?

And I think we can agree that "bureaucrats shamefully hiding the waiting lists, (and not even putting others on waiting lists) which led to the deaths of folks who put their lives on the line for this country, in order to line their pockets" is despicable, whatever the reason behind it, and that those bureaucrats should be fired and punished to the full extent of the law.

[BoSoxGal]

I agree that it's obviously a budgetary issue, thus Congress should be pointing the finger at themselves as well.

Reminds me of the finger pointing and criticism of agency leadership that goes on when a child dies whose family was involved in state family services intervention - people resign or are fired, a discussion about strained budgets and impossible caseloads ensues, a committee is convened to look at the problem, then everything goes back to situation normal once the press coverage dies down.

The truth is that we apparently don't really care about children, veterans, the elderly, the disabled, etc. - at least not enough to put the $ where it needs to be.

And corporate taxation is at a 60-year low, with many rich corporations avoiding taxes altogether.

[Econoline]

BTW...the director of the Phoenix VA Hospital where this all started is still out on paid leave.

[BoSoxGal]

That doesn't surprise me; we just went through a termination in my county which took well over a year to conclude, with the individual on paid administrative leave for 6 months prior to termination. I learned a lot about employment law in the process, working with our HR insurer's counsel and an HR specialist we hired to assist with an investigation of this employee.

Employment law, especially as applies to public employees, is very protectionist of the employee. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, but as a result, the employer must be very careful in going about investigation to provide the foundation for a termination (except, of course, in cases where the violations of personnel policies are absolutely clear and unquestionable). Keeping individuals on paid administrative leave during this process limits their ability to raise a claim, because getting one's pay and benefits while not having to work leaves no room to accuse the employer of harm.

We did everything as right as we could, and we are still facing a wrongful termination lawsuit - apparently that's pretty common, too.