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A Gosh Darned Separate Thread for the Frackin' VA Scandal
joshofalltrades
Class TraitorSmoke-filled roomRegistered User regular
Class TraitorSmoke-filled roomRegistered User regular
So this guy, you might have heard of him, Eric Shinseki, just submitted his resignation over a veteran's health care scandal.
Some people lay the feet exclusively at the feet of one party or the other, but if you ask me personally, the mess started with GWB and then the Republicans failed to give the Democrats the resources needed to handle this.
Why yes, this is a lazy OP! If you want something added to it, batsignal me.
Eric K. Shinseki resigned Friday as secretary of veterans affairs, taking responsibility for a scandal in the VA health-care system over excessive waiting times and coverups of what he called “systemic” problems.
President Obama announced that he accepted Shinseki’s resignation after agreeing with his embattled VA secretary that he had become a “distraction” as the department struggles to deal with a huge increase of veterans in need of care after more than a decade of war overseas.
Video
Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki apologized to veterans and their families, to members of congress and to the American people Friday morning, saying the recently revealed issues at the VA are \
Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki apologized to veterans and their families, to members of congress and to the American people Friday morning, saying the recently revealed issues at the VA are "indefensible" and announcing changes within the system.
President Obama appointed VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson to lead the department after Shinseki resigned amid calls for his removal.
Obama made the announcement shortly after Shinseki apologized publicly Friday for what he called an “indefensible” lack of integrity among some senior leaders of the VA health-care system and announced several remedial steps, including a process to remove top officials at the troubled VA medical center in Phoenix.
Speaking after a meeting with Shinseki at the White House, Obama said Shinseki had offered him his resignation.
“With considerable regret, I accepted,” Obama said. “We don’t have time for distractions,” he added. “We need to fix the problem.”
He said Sloan D. Gibson, the deputy secretary of veterans affairs, is taking over as acting secretary until a permanent replacement for Shinseki is found and confirmed by the Senate.
Obama paid tribute to Shinseki, telling reporters that he arrived at his decision to accept the VA chief’s resignation because of Shinseki’s “belief that he would be a distraction from the task at hand, which is to make sure that what’s broken gets fixed so that his fellow veterans are getting the services that they need.”
“He is a very good man,” Obama said. “He’s a good person who’s done exemplary work on our behalf.” He said Shinseki concluded that “he could not carry out the next stages of reform without being a distraction himself.”
“I think he is deeply disappointed in the fact that bad news did not get to him and that the structures weren’t in place for him to identify this problem quickly and fix it,” Obama said. “His priority now is to make sure that happens, and he felt like new leadership . . . would serve our veterans best, and I agree with him.”
Earlier Friday, Shinseki gave no indication that he intended to resign, despite growing calls for him to step down because of the scandal.
At the end of a speech to an annual conference of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans in Washington, Shinseki addressed a new interim report on the VA health-care system’s problems. He said he now knows that the problems are “systemic,” rather than isolated as he thought in the past.
“That breach of integrity is irresponsible,” he told the largely supportive audience. “It is indefensible and unacceptable to me.” He said he was “too trusting” of some top officials and “accepted as accurate reports that I now know to have been misleading with regard to patient wait times.”
Obama summoned Shinseki to a meeting at the White House at 10:15 a.m. Friday to discuss the problems in the VA health-care system. The meeting ended at about 11 a.m., and Obama headed to the White House briefing room.
Obama said the VA’s initial review showed that “the misconduct has not been limited to a few VA facilities, but many across the country.” He said that was “totally unacceptable,” adding: “Last week I said that if we found misconduct, it would be punished, and I meant it.”
In response to a question, Obama said he would leave it to the Justice Department to determine “whether there’s been criminal wrongdoing” within the VA system.
Reacting to the resignation, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) told reporters that Shinseki’s departure does not absolve Obama of blame and vowed that congressional Republicans would hold the president accountable for fixing the problems. He urged Obama to order the VA to cooperate with a House investigation and to “outline his vision” for getting to the bottom of the problems.
Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said in a statement: “It is now time to restore veterans’ trust in the reliability of the care they are receiving from the VA.” He pledged to do “everything I can to ensure that the Congress works to address the root causes” of the problems.
House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller (R-Fla.) vowed Friday to intensify his panel’s probe of an alleged coverup of the agency’s delays in getting basic health-care meetings for veterans.
“There will be no honeymoon period,” Miller told reporters after Shinseki’s announcement.
Miller said he has a good working relationship with Gibson and expects to speak with the acting VA secretary later Friday. But he said his committee will continue to dig into the scandal.
Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who called for Shinseki’s resignation Friday morning shortly before Obama’s announcement, reiterated her previous suggestion that an outside executive might be the best long-term leader for the department. Such a leader might “provide a fresh look,” she said.
Duckworth told The Washington Post that Shinseki reached a tipping point once the debate centered on his political standing. Replacing him would return the focus to caring for veterans, she said. Duckworth lost both her legs while serving in Iraq as an Army helicopter pilot and later worked under Shinseki at the VA before winning a House seat from a suburban Chicago district in 2012.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), who also served in Iraq as a member of the Hawaii National Guard, said in a statement that the VA “has lost sight of its mission.” She added: “Our loyalty, anger and hurt must be focused on taking action to ensure that not another day passes where a veteran in need remains waiting in the dark. We are facing a crisis, with veterans waiting months and sometimes years on official or secret waiting lists, while others are lost in the bureaucracy. This is unacceptable, and dishonors these great Americans who sacrificed so much.”
Calling for “a systemic overhaul,” Gabbard said she is drafting legislation to “ensure that veterans are immediately able to access care from a doctor, whether in the VA system or not.“
In a statement, Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said he was saddened by Shinseki’s resignation, calling him “an American hero who courageously served his country in war, rose to be the Army chief of staff and has dedicated his distinguished career to helping his fellow soldiers and veterans.”
Sanders said: “The new leadership must transform the culture of the VA, establish accountability and punish those responsible for the reprehensible manipulation of wait times.”
A veterans’ group, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said in a statement that its members were “outraged” by the scandal and “ready for new management, new oversight, and new energy.”
The group called on Obama to “demonstrate his own leadership and bring under control a deep systemic element of incompetence and corruption that clearly exists in the VA.” It urged him to “look for an Iraq or Afghanistan veteran who will lead an aggressive turnaround of the VA” as the new permanent secretary.
The American Legion, the first major veterans’ group to call for Shinseki’s resignation, called his departure “a beginning.” It said the solution to the VA’s problems “is to weed out the incompetence and corruption” within the Veterans Health Administration and the Veterans Benefits Administration.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said in a Twitter message: “Simply replacing Sec. Shinseki — while necessary — is in no way sufficient to begin to eliminate the rot that has plagued veterans’ healthcare.”
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the House minority leader, said Shinseki’s departure “will not solve the systemic challenges within the VA and its medical facilities. It is up to all of us — in Congress and in the administration — to review the facts, fix the problems, and improve our efforts to ensure veterans receive the care they need, when they need it.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said: “Secretary Shinseki’s resignation is just the first step in addressing the institutional neglect of veterans at the VA, but that alone won’t solve the problem. The systemic mismanagement will continue unless we bring reform to the VA and hold all those who are responsible accountable.”
Rubio urged the Senate to pass a bill he has sponsored that would give the new VA secretary authority to fire those responsible for “neglecting, mistreating, or mismanaging care for our veterans.”
Shinseki, 71, a retired Army general who was wounded in Vietnam as a young officer, addressed the issue in his first public speech since the release Wednesday of a blistering interim report by the Veterans Affairs inspector general.
That independent review found that VA officials throughout the medical system had falsified records to hide the amount of time veterans had to wait for medical appointments. The allegations that VA officials were using elaborate schemes to hide long waiting times date back as far as 2010. The preliminary report’s findings, however, triggered a new flurry of calls for Shinseki’s resignation on Capitol Hill and fed widespread speculation that Obama would be forced to replace him.
In his speech Friday morning, Shinseki touted his department’s successes in reducing homelessness among veterans, which he said has declined 24 percent from 2010 to 2014 despite a tough economy. He received a warm welcome from the Coalition for Homeless Veterans, and the conferees gave him a standing ovation at the end of his speech on the main topic.
Then Shinseki addressed what he called “the elephant in the room” and apologized to veterans, members of Congress and the American people for the health-care scandal. “All of them deserve better from their VA,” he said.
“I can’t explain the lack of integrity among some of the leaders of our health-care facilities,” he said. “And so I will not defend it, because it is indefensible. But I can take responsibility for it, and I do.”
He added: “So given the facts I now know, I apologize as the senior leader of the Department of Veterans Affairs. . . . But I also know this: that leadership and integrity problems can and must be fixed — and now.”
In addition to initiating a process to remove senior leaders of the Phoenix VA medical center, Shinseki said he issued directives that no senior VA executive will receive any performance award this year and that patient wait times be deleted from officials’ performance reviews as a measure of their success. He said the department is also contacting 1,700 veterans in Phoenix, who had been put on unofficial waiting lists, to ensure that they receive immediate care.
Shinseki asked Congress for “greater authority to remove senior leaders” and requested congressional support to fill existing VA leadership positions that are still vacant.
“This situation can be fixed,” he said. “We can do this in the days ahead, just as we have done for the past five years with veterans’ homelessness.”
The audience welcomed Shinseki warmly as he entered the room in tribute to what officials of the Coalition for Homeless Veterans said was his commitment to their cause
John Driscoll, president and chief executive of the coalition, expressed confidence that Shinseki would address the VA health-care issues effectively. “I do believe that, armed with the findings of that report, his response is going to be swift and deliberate and well-reasoned,” he said in an interview.
Shinseki has proven to be a strong ally of the coalition, making the goal of ending veteran homelessness by 2015 one of his department’s top priorities.
“He has changed the world in which we operate,” Driscoll said. “He brought the coordination, he brought the leadership, he made a very firm plan on how to approach the issue of veteran homelessness — the focus on housing, the focus on employment and the focus on access to health services.”
On Thursday, Shinseki made an impassioned case to Democratic lawmakers and veterans groups that he can repair the Department of Veterans Affairs, even as calls for his resignation mounted and support from the White House appeared to wane.
The White House skirted questions Thursday about whether Obama still has confidence in Shinseki’s ability to lead the department, and a spokesman said the president is withholding judgment about who is responsible for the department’s failings until he reviews pending investigations of what went wrong.
By late Thursday, one-fifth of the Senate Democratic caucus had called for Shinseki’s ouster, and at least two dozen House Democrats, most of them locked in difficult reelection fights, were demanding that he be replaced.
Rep. Michael H. Michaud (Maine), the top Democrat on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said late Thursday that Shinseki should step down. The committee’s chairman, Rep. Jeff Miller, has also called on Shinseki to leave office.
With his political support rapidly dwindling, Shinseki worked to retain the support of major veterans groups, which have backed him during the crisis, with the exception of the American Legion.
“He did not give any indication that he’s planning on stepping down,” Roscoe Butler, a deputy director with the American Legion, said Thursday.
In an hour-long meeting with veterans groups Thursday, Shinseki outlined plans to hold accountable VA employees who falsified waiting-list records.
Shinseki acknowledged that he had been too trusting of the information he received from VA hospital employees, and he said that during his 38-year military career he always thought he could trust reports from the field. Internal VA audits of 216 health-care centers have largely confirmed the inspector general’s findings of “systemic” efforts by VA employees to cover up long waits for medical care, according to the veterans groups that met with the secretary.
Some people lay the feet exclusively at the feet of one party or the other, but if you ask me personally, the mess started with GWB and then the Republicans failed to give the Democrats the resources needed to handle this.
Why yes, this is a lazy OP! If you want something added to it, batsignal me.
joshofalltrades on
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Which is admittedly ironic, since the last time he was fired in Washington was because he warned about exactly this problem (as part of his claim that the peacekeeping mission in Iraq would take 300k+ soldiers).
We've been taking shitty care of our veterans since before Bush, but creating millions of new ones was the anvil that smashed the poor camel entirely. Not funding it was refusing to triage your now mangled camel.
I hope Stewart gets pissed on this, he helped do some lifting when Jim Webb was pushing for the GI Bill increase and he really got the 9/11 workers fund going.
To be fair, the Democrats are not blameless, but it's hardly as cut and dried an issue as FOX News would have us all believe.
Actually there have been some productive GOP members on this as well, usually veterans. And most of the best Democrats on this issue have usually been veterans as well. Congress tends to only really push for veterans programs when it's full of them. I don't expect the VA to be fixed now, but I do think our generation of veterans is actually intent on running for political office and many are furious about this.
No. This is patently false, and the proof is the work of Kenneth Kizer, Clinton's VHA head and a miracle worker. Kizer was the man who took a VA that was basically a house of horrors and made it into a world beater in healthcare. For that, the GOP hounded him out of office.
So no, the truth is that one party wants to fix things, and one party wants to break things because government cannot be allowed to outperform the private sector.
The rep you want to watch is Tammy Duckworth, who is not only a disabled vet (double leg amputation), but also served as a VA Deputy Secretary before kicking a deadbeat's ass in 2012.
Let's be honest here, yes, the Democrats want to fix it. But this isn't a gigantic fustercluck just because Republicans had the Democrats' hands tied. Falsifying records and covering this shit up is pretty serious stuff.
It doesn't mean that the Republicans don't share in the blame (I would continue to argue that they are vastly more in the wrong here) but let's not try to whitewash people just because they're on our side of the party divide. Both sides aren't the same but both sides did fuck up.
That article talks about quality of care, which is only half the issue. Access is the other one, and even that article admits that was still a problem. Maybe if Gore gets elected they get around to that problem.
Yes but...
The VA is a discretionary budget item, so they make do with what they get. There's no binding commitment like dedicated entitlements, say medicare, where they simply rack tally up what's needed and send it to congress and then the funding games. It's thrown in with all the other discretionary crap where congress decides what the budget isa and then everyone fights over how big a piece of the pie they get.
In order to fix the VA and not have this turn into a robbing Peter to pay Paul situation the VA either needs to be an entitlement like medicare, or the entire budget needs to be increased.
Many of the metrics that fuel Kizer's success story are widely cooked by middle managers.
You know how this works because I've seen your posts in educational threads. A 'reformer' goes into an institution, institutes performance metrics, and instead of incentivizing the desired behavior it inadvertently incentivizes faking the metrics.
That's not to say that Kizer didn't do good things. He did. The VA has one of the best EMR systems in the country, for instance. But we need to look past 10-year-old articles proclaiming the VA as a miracle.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
But entitlements!
Seriously, though, yes. The VA needs to fire a lot of people, hire replacements, hire independent auditors to watch those replacements, and get a huge increase in its operating budget.
Unfortunately, the GOP would be all too happy to stop at step 1.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I think the GOPs end game on the VA is the same as it's going to be for medicare. Keep screaming about how shitty government run systems are while free market cock snot is dribbling down their chin. Scream that they while they hate "Obamacare" some of those state exchanges are fairly good, look at Kynect in a red state, real Americans know how to run a market. At which point the Democrats will see a chance to strengthen the exchanges and VA healthcare, medicare, medicaid, are all going shrink massively and dump most people into the exchanges.
In fact, I'm betting money this is going to happen in the next dozen or so years.
Actually, that's less on Kizer's head, and more on the GOP apparatchiks that followed him. Kevin Drum has a good bit on this:
The piece you linked notes that you could begin to see these issues appearing in 2005.
The VA got more funding.
The problem is that 'more funding' is relative to the amount of funding they had previously, which was the Washington equivalent of spare change found at the base of a payphone. The VA just plain doesn't have enough money to fulfill the post-tour promises given to troops, and what limited money it does have ends-up being pissed away on various corrupt contractor deals.
Honestly, there was nothing Shinseki could do. The program is broke & basically ruined because of the way it has to interact with a system dominated by shady contractors that are buddies with sitting politicians; caring about vets & being a competent actor does not magically make the problems disappear.
Blaming Shinseki for trying to cheat within a system that is nothing but cheating is fucking stupid. It was the only reasonable thing to do (aside from perhaps just trying to burn the whole thing to the ground).
From there you go to Records and Registration with a gigantic ass line if you don't make an appointment. If you're seen that day, they ask for your current employment status, personal wealth yadda yadda to see where you fall on the scale. Fall too low, and your meds and some other prescription services are free. It's tiered, so you either pay nothing or some extremely small co-pay amount for certain meds.
After Records and Registration, you get assigned to a group with a care provider and then an appointment to meet with them. Your first visit they do a preliminary health inspection, find any pressing needs and matters, and basically give you a quick check up. Upon leaving that first appointment you should have an appointment to different specialists based on need (skin/brain/back/feet/hands/eyes/dental, you get the idea). These appointments are usually a few weeks to a month out.
My main complaint? Over medication. I went to the VA ER once and got an epipen and some benadryl; then got fast tracked to a dermatologist, who then gave me more benadryl. When that didn't work, I got generic forms of benadryl. When that didn't work and adverse symptoms started to appear and it looked like I was getting worse, I got different types of generic benadryl and medicine to combat symptoms. When that didn't work, I got more medicine to combat those symptoms, on and on and on. It kept going and going and I wasn't getting better, it had been 6 months, I was taking 16 pills in the morning, 8 during the afternoon, and 12 more at night. After a few months, I was given a few options:
- 1) Take a steroid that I can only be on for 2 months but will give me hyperthyroid issues and cause permanent kidney damage
- 2) Take sporofil(?) that I can only be on for 2 weeks but will give me permanent liver damage but should eradicate whatever was causing the issue
- 3) Take medicine they give to Lupus patients but it hasn't been used specifically for my issue and was therefore not approved by the FDA for those uses; but in some trials they found it fixed the issue
- 4) Or, just get used to the pain and deal with it for the rest of my life.
I was at a loss. The pain was getting worse, I wasn't active much anymore because of so much medicine I was taking; but I had to decide what to do.I stopped taking all the medicine.
Within a few days I was back to normal and come to find out I'm allergic to benadryl. WHO WOULD'VE THOUGHT?
At no point did the dermatologist think to do an allergy screening. At no point did any of the doctors or my primary care physician look to see that I was prescribed to take 36 pills a day. When the question is: "Why aren't you getting better?" the VA's answer was always "here, have some more medicine."
The issue with the VA is culture and how it's treated: It's understaffed, underfunded and behind the tech curve. When I was going to put in my disability packet I was told to expect to hear something in 6 months to two years. If you get denied, you can appeal, but that means it's another year or two years before you hear another response. It's a culture of, "yea, we'll get to you.....eventually. Please hold for the next available representative......"
Regardless, politically, no one cares about the VA. It's an issue because it's election season and the GOP wants to have another thing to blame the administration on. It's unfortunate Shinseki resigned, I really liked him, but he couldn't address and fix the culture; however, you'll notice that the party didn't even wait to target the white house. Shinseki probably stopped talking for 15 seconds and someone was already like, "It's all Obama's fault!" It's just a stepping stone for them, how close can they throw a dart and get close to the source?
You think the national democrats give a damn? They just want it out of the limelight so they don't have to yell at people about facts that no one is going to remember or listen to, so essentially into a vacuum. You honestly think Obama is going to be able to get a new VA secretary confirmed? With 1 1/2 years left in office?
After election season, all anyone will remember is that some veterans died waiting for care. It just gets added to the synonyms already associated with the VA and "big" government.
He did a piece last week (I think) on how the VA has been fucking over veterans since pretty much the formation of our country. Yeah, he was pretty pissed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/27/us/veterans-groups-lash-out-at-republican-senator.html?_r=0
I'm not a veteran, but from what I've seen, if you are more than 50% service connected, you get good care.
The trick is getting that level of service connection.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Care in the military can be really bad as well. No matter what you go to the base doctor for you always seem to emerge with motrin and those damn yellow cough drops. Or asinine situations like when they pulled all my wisdom teeth without putting me out. I objected and the dentist, a Navy Captain, handled the situation through direct order. So a lot of people will seek out private care rather than go through the military system even if it means paying for it out of pocket.
Now some facilities are great, so it's hit or miss. The VA can be very good as well, but it's also hit or miss. So when they pull a Motrin and cough drops on you, people get rather furious.
Undermine the democratic president and you undermine the democrats.
...It's a little early to be jockeying for 2016, though. The upcoming midterms are probably more of what the Republicans are going to be aiming attacks at.
Nothing stopping them from jumping on this issue again in 2016, of course, but I imagine there will be something a little more current (imagined or otherwise) for them to use as a rhetorical tambourine.
Benghazi says otherwise.
It's 100% about Clinton.
The bolded doesn't bode well for this, especially in an election year when the Republicans are more determined than ever to make this hurt the Democrats.
Benghazi is certainly not 100% about Clinton just like screaming about Obamacare was not 100% about Obama.
Benghazi is great for fund raising, which is why they are all fund raising like hell off of it now with no Clinton in the race. It's also a legitimate cock-up they can scream about to help keep the notion that Democrats cannot be counted on to defend the nation because they're weak in the face of our enemies and only get things done by scheming with those who would do us harm in the dark away from the press. In a party now suffering a civil war over foreign policy between it's libertarian and neoconservative wings Benghazi is a great unifier as well. They can slam the president from both the "why were they even there and you didn't get congressional approval for Lybia so your own illegal actions are to blame" isolationist angle and the "you should have properly supported our fellow Americans" chest thumping side while never having to realize these are contradictory angles.
Sure Clinton matters and has something to do with Benghazi, but at this point it's a fund raising power and a huge shibboleth as well.
Anyone familiar with the house bill know why it was shot down?
MWO: Adamski