OUR CRIMINAL VETERANS ADMINISTRATION

At least 40 veterans on a secret waiting list at the Veterans Administration hospital in Phoenix have died while waiting months — in some cases a year or more — for appointments, a whistleblower told CNN.

The secret waiting list was a scheme by managers to get around the VA rule that patients should see a doctor within 30 days of making an appointment, said Dr. Sam Foote.

When a vet asked for an appointment, his request wasn’t entered in the official computer system, said Dr. Foote, who worked at the VA hospital in Phoenix for 24 years.

The patient’s data was kept instead on a secret electronic list. Only when an appointment with a physician could be scheduled within 14 days was it entered into the official system.

This gave "the appearance they were improving greatly the waiting times, when in fact they were not," he said.

If a vet died while waiting for an appointment, his or her name was deleted from the secret list. There was no official record he or she had ever asked for treatment.

Before airing the story April 24, CNN obtained emails indicating senior managers knew of and approved the practice. Other "high level officials" corroborated Dr. Foote’s account, CNN said.

In addition to her $169,900 salary, the director of the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care System got a $9,345 bonus last year.

Sharon Helman had been the director of the VA hospital in Spokane, Washington, from July of 2007 through July of 2008, when at least 22 vets in her service area committed suicide. Ms. Helman reported only 9.

At least 19 vets have died because of delays at other VA hospitals in simple medical screenings such as colonoscopies or endoscopies, CNN reported in January.

Nor is Phoenix the only VA hospital where there has been a systematic effort to conceal long wait times.

Officials at the Greater Los Angeles Medical Center began in 2009 to destroy records of requests for medical exams that were more than a year old, charged Oliver Mitchell, a former patient services assistant, in February.

The Daily Caller obtained a recording of a November, 2008 meeting that confirms Mr. Mitchell’s charge.

System wide, more  than 1.5 million backlogged orders for medical treatment or tests have been cancelled, the Washington Examiner reported Thursday (5/1).

Poor documentation in patient files makes it impossible to determine whether the vets got the care they needed before the orders were cancelled, said the Government Accountability Office, an arm of Congress.

Claims for service-connected disabilities should be processed with 125 days, according to VA guidelines. The average wait time for a claim to be processed was 273 days, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America said last August.

Two thirds of claims processors received performance bonuses in 2011, a year in which the backlog of unprocessed disability claims ballooned by 155 percent.

There were nearly three times as many claims processors in 2012 as there’d been in 1997, noted Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla, chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee. Each field worker processed, on average, 135 claims in 1997, he said. In 2012, just 73 claims per field worker were processed.

During the time the backlog increased more than 600 percent, the VA executive in charge of processing disability benefits received nearly $60,000 in bonuses.

Doctors who’ve provided poor treatment — including one whose license to practice medicine had expired, and another who failed to reach 12 of 13 performance goals — were awarded millions of dollars in "performance" bonuses, the Government Accountability Office said in a report last July.

A senior financial manager resigned after a colleague was killed in the government vehicle he was driving while drunk. A few months later, the VA rehired him at a six figure salary.

"They don’t want to seem to hold anyone accountable for doing anything wrong," Rep. Miller said at a hearing in April. "The VA needs to quit being afraid of disciplining people and firing them."

The VA’s leaders are trying harder to cover up than to clean up massive negligence and corruption. The House Veterans Affairs Committee has counted 30 instances just this year in which journalists seeking information have been stonewalled.

After the ABC affiliate in Raleigh, N.C. discovered in January a privacy breach on  its web site, reporters asked the VA how serious the breach was, and what was being done to correct it. They’re still waiting for answers.

When reporters for the ABC affiliate in Denver asked about inadequate parking at the VA Medical Center there, the public information officer hung up the phone.

"The VA’s administration is really thumbing their nose at us, but also thumbing their nose at Congress," said CNN’s Drew Griffin.

What’s going on at the VA would have been a major scandal in every administration before this one, but had drawn relatively little attention from the national news media, in part because there are so many other scandals, in larger part because so many bigfoot journalists are reluctant to report on stories which reflect poorly on President Obama.

This must change. What is happening to our veterans is a crime.  That it is happening at a time when the Secretary of Veterans Affairs is retired Gen. Eric Shinseki, a former Army chief of staff, is especially appalling.  He, of all people, should be looking out for the troops.

It’s time to shine a spotlight on the criminals. The Army should recall Gen. Shinseki to active duty and (after a court martial) bust him to private and give him a dishonorable  discharge. He deserves America’s contempt, not a big pension.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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