Congress delay, deny, till veterans die then distract

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
June 3, 2014

Last night as I was dealing with an abscessed tooth topped off with a sinus infection and medication, I was flipping through the 24 news stations when I came across what Rachel Maddow was talking about.

The subject was veterans and the public's inability to pay attention longer than a day.


VA problems still need congressional action, Shinseki resignation notwithstanding.

"Rachel Maddow points out that the resignation of Eric Shinseki as Secretary of Veterans Affairs did not solve the V.A.’s problems and Congress needs to take further action even as the Shinseki resignation has distracted the nation’s focus."

If you think the American public really cares about what it going on with our veterans, this shows they just can't pay attention very long.

The peak here was on Memorial Day and Friday when Shinseki resigned.

CNN just released a poll 6 minutes ago about how President Obama handled the mess at the VA.

According to the poll, 58% say they disapprove of how the President's handling the VA scandal, with 37% saying they approve of Obama's actions.

The Veterans Affairs controversy has mushroomed since CNN first reported last November on allegations of alarming shortcomings within the VA medical care system that potentially have had deadly consequences in dozens of cases.

The most disturbing and striking problems emerged in Arizona last month, with sources revealing to CNN details of a secret waiting list for treatment. According to the sources, at least 40 veterans died while waiting for care at the Phoenix, Arizona, VA medical center.

Do they even really know what happened? Do they know how long it has been happening? Maybe they need to do a cable "reality" show so people pay attention but they really don't care or they would have known none of this is new.

Before Shinseki, most of us were outraged over Jim Nicholson and wanted him fired.

"Within months of taking office at the VA, Nicholson had to deal with a $1 billion shortfall at the agency, requiring the administration to appeal to Congress for emergency spending.

He resigned but nothing was fixed by spending more money yet holding no one really accountable, especially other members of Congress. James Peake 2007-2009 walked into this. "The VA's backlog is between 400,000 and 600,000 claims, with delays of 177 days. Nicholson in May pledged to cut that time to 145 days, but he has made little headway with thousands of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan returning home."

Peake promised to “virtually eliminate” the current list of 69,000 veterans who have waited more than 30 days for an appointment to get VA medical care. Such long waits runs counter to department policy, and a group of Iraq war veterans have filed a lawsuit alleging undue delays. He said VA plans to open 64 new community-based outpatient clinics this year and 51 next year to improve access to health care in rural areas.

Daniel L. Cooper, a retired Navy Vice Admiral, Undersecretary for VA Benefits resigned in February of 2008. There were not enough doctors and nurses but the worst thing was Social Workers were being hired for mental health patients, in other words, to treat PTSD veterans. OVer in Little Rock Arkansas they were using veterans in human experimentation in surgery without telling them according to the VA Inspector General's report. The same report also released this.

conducted several HIV tests without patients' permission, filmed dementia patients without consent and destroyed records just before a federal audit. The report says the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences' internal review board, which oversaw the researchers, also failed to follow up to make sure researchers corrected the problems in several cases.

Where was all this outrage about our veterans seven years ago? Everyone was upset back then but that attention died just as the attention died again. Congress seems to have moved onto the latest scandal about Bowe Bergdahl and how questions about desertion need to be answered.

“He walked away. He walked right off the base,” Bergdahl’s old team leader, former Army Sgt. Evan Buetow, told ABC News Monday. “The fact of the matter is, he deserted us in the middle of Afghanistan to go and find the Taliban… People calling him a hero, people calling him this great soldier, it’s a spit in the face to the soldiers who were there… and more importantly it’s a spit in the face to the soldiers who died as a direct result of him leaving.”

Congress jumped on this scandal just like Benghazi, since they can pretend they had nothing to do with either scandal.

Most of us are a bit more skeptical since a true, honest hearing about the VA would require members of congress to explain their own actions and hold people accountable. Why, they are responsible for all the committees they sit on including Veterans Affairs. It is all false outrage. If they really cared they would have fixed all of this decades ago instead of doing what John Boehner admitted he was pushing for, privatizing the VA.

Around the same time the GAO found there was no accountability for claims processors.

The VA had claims going back 50 years that were "pending" with appeals going back to WWII as part of 800,000 claims and appeals. But with all this, this pretty much sums up how little things have changed in all these years.

The VA's Office of Inspector General (VAOIG) has been conducting audits, or investigations, of a number of VA Regional Offices (VAROs). There are over 50 VAROs around the country, each set up to handle the claims of veterans in a particular geographical area.

The latest series of VAOIG investigations centers on charges that VARO administrators and employees deliberately falsified "timeliness" statistics sent to the VA's Central Office (VACO). This would be information that shows when a claim was received and how, with a documented timeline including date/time stamps, it moved through the process.

The first heads have begun to roll in this investigation. During the week of October 6, 2008, four employees at the New York VARO, including the Director, were placed on administrative leave. More accurately, they were removed from their positions awaiting the outcome of the investigation. Sources close to this investigation say that those removed, and others, were found to have been fudging the "timeliness" figures. And, there are allegations that documents, including paperwork essential to the claim process had been destroyed.

If Congress really got serious on looking for accountability, they would have to admit what they failed to do all these years and that is something they just don't want to do. After all, it is easier to just cause a huge outrage, pretend they did something about it, until they can distract the attention of the press and drop the story.

Veterans deserve so much better from us but they will keep getting shafted leaving them to think delay, deny until they die is acceptable to the American people. I shut off the TV and cried.