Introduction:
As the medical profession in the United States is taken over by Obamacare, costs are going up rapidly and options are few.  If you are unfortunate enough to rely upon the VA hospitals for your medical care, you already live in a dystopia that may await the rest of us, unless difficult decisions are made very soon.

Overview /recap articles:

A Complete Guide to the Scandals of the Obama Administration:  [For example,]
  •   VA employees include child molesters, rapists, and kidnappers
  •   VA staff left a veteran's body in a shower for nine hours, tried to cover up their mistakes
  •   Four VA staffers were forced to resign after an Oklahoma veteran being treated was discovered with maggots in his wounds
  •   A VA manager banned Christmas trees from office cubicles
  •   VA officials spent more than $1.7 billion ($900 million over budget) creating an ornately designed hospital in Colorado that is "widely considered the biggest construction failure in the agency's history."
  •   Seven of 10 VA facilities reviewed were caught falsifying appointment books to minimize the appearance of long waits
  •   The VA spent $21,000 on a fake Christmas tree
  •   Over a period during which the VA spent $20 million on its expensive, high-end art collection, more than 1,000 veterans died waiting for care
  •   The VA spent $670K on two art sculptures for a center for blind veterans
  •   The head of the Phoenix VA facility, Sharon Helman, admitted not reporting $50,000 in gifts she received from businesses seeking VA contracts, including a car and $5,000 in cash
  •   VA funds were taken to instead finance the resettlement of 3,000 Afghan interpreters in the U.S.
  •   Calls to the VA's suicide hotline regularly go to voicemail

The VA is deeply, thoroughly broken.  In 2014, after it was revealed that at least 75 US veterans had died while waiting to get appointments at their VA hospitals — with more than 120,000 never tended to, just abandoned or deliberately shuffled from one bureaucratic boondoggle to another — public outcry forced the following: congressional hearings, an internal VA investigation, an Obama administration investigation, an FBI criminal probe, a RAND Corp. investigation, an Office of Special Counsel investigation, and the "early retirement" of VA chief Dr. Robert Petzel and Eric Shinseki, secretary of veterans affairs.  "I assure you, if there is misconduct, it will be punished," then-President Barack Obama said.  "I want every veteran to know we are going to fix what is wrong."  Yes, the federal government was going to internally fix what was wrong with a massive, federally funded institution.  Last Thursday [8/10/2017], more than three years and two new secretaries later, the New York Times reported that current head David Shulkin is fighting to keep out the director of the Washington Medical Center, Brian Hawkins, who was fired last month for running a hospital at "the highest levels of chaos."

The VA must be held accountable.  Here's what Congress needs to do.  A recent study completed by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that, on average, it takes six months to a year to remove a permanent civil servant in the federal government.  Oftentimes, it takes even longer.  The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is not exempt from the red-tape that prevents agency leadership from firing or disciplining employees within their agency.  President Obama's former VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson testified at a House Committee on Veterans' Affairs hearing on the Choice Program that it was too difficult to fire a substandard VA employee.  In fact, President Obama himself said, "if you engage in an unethical practice, if you cover up a serious problem, you should be fired.  Period.  It shouldn't be that difficult."

The Editor says...
If what Mr. Obama said was true, why wasn't he impeached?

Whistleblower Faults VA Bosses for Problems With Vets Health Care.  A former U.S. Marine who exposed substandard mental health care at the troubled Phoenix VA hospital two years ago says that veterans' health care has continued to deteriorate at the facility despite legislative efforts and leadership changes.  Brandon Coleman, an employee at the Department of Veterans Affairs for more than nine years, spoke to the Washington Free Beacon following new revelations about shortfalls at the Carl T. Hayden VA hospital in Phoenix.  "I think that the Phoenix VA is a cesspool," Brandon Coleman told the Free Beacon in an October interview.  "I think it is the worst example of VA health care in the United States as we know it.  There are some other bad examples, but Phoenix is known as ground zero."

Trump VA Sec Pick Promises 'Major Reform' for Veterans Health Care.  David Shulkin on Wednesday [2/1/2017] pledged to implement "major reform" at the Department of Veterans Affairs if he is confirmed to lead the troubled agency.  Shulkin, who President Donald Trump unveiled as his choice to lead the VA in mid-January, said before a Senate panel that he does not favor "privatization" of the VA but would work to establish an integrated and modern system for veterans health care, with better partnerships between public and private facilities.

Sanders Lectures Navy SEAL Veteran:  VA Isn't Bad.  The VA has been embroiled in scandal since it was revealed that the agency had covered up lengthy delays in treatment that led to the deaths of veterans awaiting care at a Phoenix hospital.  The whistleblower reports about Arizona' fake wait list led to additional exposés about inefficiencies and budgetary issues that have contributed to the deaths of American veterans.  It was revealed in November that a VA hospital had infected or exposed 600 veterans to Hepatitis B and C, as well as HIV — the disease that leads to AIDs — due to poor dental care.

Federal Worker Union Is Blocking Republican VA Reforms.  President-elect Donald Trump promised to fire incompetent and dishonest Department of Veterans Affairs employees, but he will have to fight the American Federation of Government Employees — the largest federal worker union — every step of the way.  During the 115th Congress, Trump — along with Republican majorities in both the Senate and House of Representatives — can enact sweeping reforms to improve every department and agency in the federal workplace.  Republicans controlled the 114th Congress, too, but outgoing Democratic President Barack Obama routinely threatened to veto GOP proposals.  Trump and AFGE already share some history.  When the GOP presidential candidate proposed expanding a VA program that lets veterans get private medical care, AFGE quickly blasted the idea.

Shocker! Trump Plans To Privatize The VA Just Like He Promised On The Campaign Trail.  News headlines this week screamed about how President-elect Trump is considering a plan to partially privatize the Veterans Health Administration.  Did nobody read his campaign website during the election?

Trump considering 'public-private option' for VA reform.  President-elect Trump is considering a "public-private option" at the Department of Veterans Affairs that would allow all veterans to choose whether they want to receive care from the VA or from private doctors.  "We think we have to have kind of a ... public-private option, because some vets love the VA ... some vets want to go to the VA," a transition official told reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday [12/28/2016].  "So, the idea is to come up with a solution that solves the problem.  And it's not the easiest thing in the world because you've got all these little kingdoms out there, which is hard," the official said.  "You know, in the federal government, it's hard to break things up and start over.  So, those are the types of things that people are talking about."

VA Hospital Taught Employees to Game Wait Times.  Employees at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in southern Arizona were instructed to manipulate veterans' wait times so they appeared shorter, a newly released investigation shows.  The agency's inspector general substantiated allegations that managers at the Tuscon-based VA medical system told schedulers to "zero out" patient wait times, a scheduling practice that persisted in 2016 despite whistleblower reports of wait-time manipulation at the Phoenix VA that drew national outrage more than two years ago.  The VA inspector general report, publicly released on Wednesday [11/9/2016], provides more evidence of bad scheduling practices that stretched beyond the Phoenix VA hospital.

The Editor says...
How very fortunate for Hillary Clinton:  The IG's report was released the day after the presidential election.  She was defeated, even without adding this additional Obama scandal to the mix.

This Veterans Day, start fixing the Veterans Administration.  Just in time for Veterans Day, when we honor those who served their country in uniform, the inspector general of the Department of Veterans Affairs has unearthed another scandal.  This time, it's that scheduling staff at a clinic in southern Arizona systematically zeroed out patient wait times for thousands of appointments to make it look like goals were being met.  Worse yet, this cheating took place between December 2013 and August 2014, after the broader VA scandal.

Obama Opposes Legislation to Fix the VA.  Public awareness of the VA scandal erupted after evidence surfaced that a large number of veterans died while waiting for appointments at a medical care facility in Phoenix, Arizona.  Investigations also found the problem was nationwide with approximately 120,000 veterans waiting for care.  VA employees created "secret" waiting lists and fudged scheduling to give the appearance veterans were receivingappropriate care in a timely manner.  According to the Arizona Republic, the VA acknowledged the Phoenix facility "manipulated patient wait-time records to trigger bonuses."

Alphabet Soup Corruption.  [Scroll down]  Gen. Eric Shinseki, who became a hero to the progressive anti-war movement for his congressional testimony during the Bush administration questioning troop levels, became Obama's Secretary of Veterans Affairs.  But the agency was quickly mired in scandals at the Veteran Health Administration, where critically ill veterans were not given prompt care, lives were needlessly lost, and records were doctored to cover up such incompetence.  Like the IRS and the EPA, the VA also remains under a cloud of suspicion, well after Shinseki's resignation.

Seven Giant Scandals That Barack Obama Just Couldn't Keep Undercover!  [#4] Veterans Affairs Scandal:  Now this one is cutting really close to my heart, and I know it is so for many other Americans.  This government-created institution provided a nightmare for our vets, often having to be put on wait lists for months and even years, with many dying in the process.  Doctors, staff, and heads of certain VA's around the country altered work hours, and gave themselves raises while our wounded and maimed vets were left to fend for themselves.  The corruption in the VA still continues today, even with the head change.

No "Major Scandal" in Obama Administration?  Following revelations in 2014 that there was widespread Veterans Administration falsification of health care wait times, and that certain locations had created secret waiting lists for veterans, the media finally declared this a scandal.  But it's not Obama's scandal, it's a Veterans Affairs scandal.  Hunter Schwarz writes for the [Washington] Post that "It was a very significant scandal, to be sure, but perhaps not one that people laid directly at Obama's doorstep."  The Washington Post's Fact Checker Glenn Kessler recently referred to this one as a scandal, noting that only eight people have lost their jobs so far as a result of this veterans care debacle, not 60 as the Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert McDonald said last week on Meet the Press.  But as I have argued, there were really two scandals at the Veterans Administration at the time:  health care wait times and the disability benefits backlog.

VA scandal, two years later: nothing much has changed, has it?  Two years ago, the news that corruption at the Veterans Administration had resulting in veterans dying without care in order to bolster VA executive bonuses outraged the nation.  For the first and only time in his administration, Barack Obama demanded the resignation of a Cabinet official, VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, and pledged to reform the VA.  Congress demanded action, and everyone lamented that Americans who sacrificed so much for their nation had been exploited, ignored, and left to die by a bureaucracy more concerned about self-promotion than their care.  What's changed since the scandal broke?

13 Incompetent Failures in the Obama Administration.  [#11] Former Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki is very much the reverse of [Ben] Rhodes and [Tommy] Vietor.  A retired four-star general and a wounded combat veteran from Vietnam, he failed to improve wait times at the VA.  As news reports broke that veterans died waiting for care, Shinseki became the natural target of blame.  Nevertheless, Shinseki is neither the beginning nor the end of the problem.  As PJ Media's Bryan Preston argued, this general "just took the fall for what the bureaucrats below him were doing."  Bureaucrats gamed the system for all it was worth, and they were not forced to resign, but Shinseki took the fall for everything.

Timely news and commentary:

The VA is now offering abortions and rent-a-womb arrangements for gay couples with your tax dollars.  Fresh off the heels of the VA's robust new abortions policy:  ["]The Department of Veterans Affairs on Monday will finalize its policy of providing abortions to veterans and other beneficiaries in certain cases, including in states that have banned the procedure, according to a federal notice.["]  Oh, you silly little person who still thinks we live in a constitutional republic, you think the Hyde Amendment banning taxpayer dollars from being used for abortion will stop them?

Biden Traps Veterans on VA Plantation.  Democrats constantly crow about their faith in "the right to choose."  But that applies to little beyond abortion.  Any woman who chooses to buy a gun or send her child to a charter school should expect "pro-choice" Democrats to stand in her way.  Democrats crave control and uniformity, even when it comes to medical care for America's veterans.  Democrats want vets in the Veterans Affairs, not getting cured in the private sector.  The Obama-Biden VA waitlist scandal found veterans dying before they could see their doctors.  Donald Trump promised to fix that lethal mess.  And he did.  President Trump signed the Mission Act on June 6, 2018.  It holds that if the VA cannot book a primary medical appointment "within 20 days of the date of the request" by a veteran, or 28 days for specialty care, then that vet may seek therapy outside the VA, and the VA will foot the bill.

Biden admin looks to declare more black veterans mentally disabled because 'equity'.  More black veterans need to file for — and receive — mental health disability checks, because, according to President Biden's Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), being black and declared mentally disabled is a more "equitable" way to treat our nation's warriors.  According to the VA's Equity Assessment and Action Steps for Mental Health Compensation Benefits, released on Wednesday, "while Black Veterans receive VA benefits at higher rates than other Veterans — their grant rates for disability compensation are lower for mental health conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder."  "A higher percentage of Black Veterans currently receive disability compensation benefits than white Veterans for mental health conditions (21.7% vs. 12.7%).  On average, Black Veterans also apply for disability compensation at higher rates and receive slightly higher disability ratings from VA than white Veterans," the VA explained.  "However, Black Veterans have lower grant rates than white Veterans for mental health conditions (70.3% vs. 76.0%)."

Biden admin diverts Veterans Affairs resources to illegal immigrants.  It has been revealed that the Biden administration has been diverting resources from the Veterans Affairs (VA) organization to help illegal immigrants around the country.  Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) spoke about the matter with Fox Digital in an interview reported on Tuesday morning.  The Alabama senator recently introduced a bill titled the "No VA Resources for Illegal Aliens Act" in order to prevent it from happening again.  Tuberville told the outlet, "They've opened up care from the doctors in these [VA] community care systems.  The lines now in the VA's are getting longer.  Our funds that are supposed to go to the veterans are going to these illegal immigrants that are coming across."

VA Accused of Cutting Benefits for Jan. 6 Defendants.  The Department of Veterans Affairs is facing allegations that it cut the benefits from Jan. 6 defendants who haven't been convicted of felonies, which critics say is against VA policy.  The allegations were first reported last November by independent journalist Breanna Morello, who filed a lawsuit over the matter last week.  Morello's lawsuit claimed that the VA is stonewalling her Freedom of Information Act request for records about Jan. 6 defendants and VA benefit recipients JD Rivera, Hector Vargas Santos and Kenneth Harrelson.  [Tweet]

Veterans Affairs Found Safety Signal for Pfizer COVID Vaccine, Never Disclosed It.  A federal agency detected early in the COVID-19 vaccination campaign a safety signal for a serious problem for Pfizer's shot, a document obtained by The Epoch Times shows.  The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) detected a signal for myocarditis and pericarditis for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to the document, an email from May 13, 2021.  Myocarditis is heart inflammation while pericarditis is inflammation of tissue around the heart.

VA Reportedly Diverting Veterans' Resources to Illegals.  A recent report says that Biden's Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is redirecting resources to provide illegal aliens healthcare.  ACT for America reported that U.S. Rep. Mike Bost, Chairman of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, introduced the "No VA Resources for Illegal Aliens Act" in response to the report about VA resources going to illegal migrants.  ACT for America chair Brigitte Gabriel posted on Twitter/X Dec. 26 that the healthcare for illegals has caused "a severe breakdown in services" for veterans.  "While Veteran Affairs can't figure out how to get our poor homeless veterans off the streets, they are quick to divert critical tax-payer-funded support to illegal aliens!  Who authorized this?" Gabriel asked.  She urged Congress to act to protect our veterans and to hold officials accountable.

Republicans Introduce Bill Prohibiting VA Health Resources From Being Used for Illegal Immigrants.  This week, two Republicans introduced legislation that would prevent the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) health care resources from being used for illegal immigrants.  According to a report from Fox News, Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R) and Illinois Rep. Mike Bost (R) unveiled the legislation, called the "No VA Resources for Illegal Aliens Act."  This reportedly came after Fox News reported on complaints stating that the VA was providing healthcare services to illegal immigrants and lengthening wait times for veterans.  "Joe Biden is putting illegal immigrants over America's veterans," Tuberville said in a statement to Fox News.  "It is outrageous.  Our veterans should not be forced to wait in long lines at VA medical centers and clinics to get the care they EARNED while illegal immigrants waltz across our open border and get taxpayer-funded healthcare they NEVER earned."

88 Babies Have Been Killed in Abortions at VA Clinics Under New Biden Policy.  One year since it began performing abortions, the Department of Veterans Affairs released annualized data to the House Veterans' Affairs Committee under threat of a subpoena.  The VA disclosed to Congress that it had provided 88 abortions through the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30 — of which 64 were said to have been performed under circumstances of threats to the mother's health.  According to the VA report, the agency conducted nine abortions in pregnancies that threatened the mother's life, and 15 in pregnancies resulting from rape.  The report did not define what circumstances represented a threat to the mother's "health," leading the pro-life Republican who chairs the committee to demand more detailed information.  "Whether it's one abortion or 100 abortions, one innocent life lost to the actions of humans and not God is one too many," Rep. Mike Bost, R-Ill., chairman of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, told The Daily Signal in an emailed statement Tuesday.

Report: Leaked Veterans Affairs Training Video Promotes Abortion, Says Pregnancy Not Exclusive to Women.  A training video allegedly leaked from the Department of Veterans Affairs promotes abortion and even suggests that men can become pregnant, Fox News reported Wednesday.  The "Reproductive Health Training" video from April 2023 tells staffers how to talk to veterans who are considering aborting their babies.  "Before discussing counseling procedures, the video began with a 'note' on language that clarified, 'Not all people who seek abortions identify as women.' Another note read, 'Person who is pregnant' is inclusive and preferred to 'pregnant woman,'" according to the report.  Another slide tells staffers to use certain language about abortion, like "embryo or fetus" instead of "baby or unborn child," "veteran or person" instead of "mother," and "embryonic or fetal cardiac activity" instead of "fetal heartbeat."  [Tweet]

VA has gone full woke: 50 genders listed in survey sent to veterans.  In March, the Veterans Administration (VA) announced it was removing its motto, which was a quote from President Abraham Lincoln, apparently because it violated Team Biden's diversity, equity and inclusion rules.  "To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan," Lincoln said.  It had been the VA's motto for more than 60 years until the leftist woke mob called for its cancellation and the Biden team merrily obliged.  Washington Examiner deputy commentary editor Quin Hillyer noted at the time: "To these woke obsessives, history and tradition don't matter, nor do great intentions, nor do associations with a man of noble character and his noble cause.  All that matters are bland nods to the newest version of the lowest common denominator of performative inclusivity."  The newest version of VA woke is a survey sent to veterans that give them a list of 50 genders to choose from.

Veterans Administration training videos instruct health providers to promote abortion as safest 'option' for pregnant veterans.  The VA has come into focus as making one of most egregious attempts to push abortion into every state, regardless of the law.  Denis McDonough, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, holds the top ranking position within the VA.  While Sec McDonough has not served in the US military, his career path includes many years within the Obama administration, as well as John Podesta's Center for American Progress.  The Post Millennial received and reviewed a large collection of leaked videos that the VA uses to train health providers working within the VA.  The videos are extensive, and specifically cover reproductive health.  It should be noted that "reproductive health" covers a range of topics, but the training videos viewed by The Post Millennial, used to train VA health providers, do not touch on any training other than abortion.

Veterans shouldn't have to pay for help with filing VA paperwork, says Cortes.  A Texas Tribune report this week has turned a spotlight on one Austin-based operator who charges veterans thousands of dollars for help with their VA paperwork.  Cooke County Veterans Services Officer Tim Cortes helps veterans and their families with issues stemming from military service, including connecting veterans with the benefits they are due from the Department of Veterans Affairs, at no cost.

Joe Biden is Illegally Funding Abortions Up to Birth for Any Reason at VA Clinics.  Since 1992, the VA has been statutorily prohibited from using taxpayer dollars for abortion.  On September 9, 2022, the Biden Administration Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) disregarded this longstanding statutory prohibition on taxpayer funding for abortion at the VA and issued a new rule that includes funding abortion for "health" reasons.  The undefined reference to health means, as in Doe v.  Bolton (the companion case to Roe v. Wade), that abortions can now be done at the VA for virtually any reason.  The High Court held in Doe that, "medical judgment may be exercised in the light of all factors — physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman's age — relevant to the wellbeing of the patient.  All these factors may relate to health."  For the past 30 years, abortion has been allowed in the rare cases where the mother was faced with an emergency situation or life-threatening complication.  Because there is nothing in the Interim Final Rule which defines health, the health exception is not limited in any way.  This means the VA is now providing abortion on demand, with no limits.

Mom of Atlanta hospital gunman 'blames messed-up VA prescription for shooting that killed one woman.  Atlanta police are believed to be closing in on a gunman who opened fire inside a hospital, killing one woman and injuring four others before hijacking a car and fleeing.  Deion Patterson, 24, who served in the Coast Guard for five years, was attending an appointment to get anxiety medicine with his mother on Wednesday morning. [...] Raphael Warnock, a senator for Georgia and pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, spoke on at the Capitol on Wednesday and condemned the easy access to guns.

Deion Patterson — Shooter and Killer at Atlanta Northside Hospital — Now Media Will Drop Story.  Deion Patterson is the left wing radical extremist who [shot] up gun free zone Northside hospital in Atlanta, killing at least one person.  Now that Deion Patterson can't be portrayed as some "MAGA extremist", the media will drop the story like a hot potato.  The shooting is most likely fueled by left wing rage against [...] white people.

Atlanta Police Capture Suspect In Medical Facility Shooting.  The Atlanta Police Department has announced that after an eight-hour manhunt, 24-year-old Deion Patterson, the gunman responsible for killing one and injuring four in a midtown Atlanta hospital, was taken into custody.  Patterson was reportedly apprehended in a condominium complex near Truist Park, 11 miles from the scene, on Wednesday evening.  Atlanta police announced that his getaway vehicle was recovered in a parking garage nearby.  On Wednesday morning, Patterson shot five women, between the ages of 25 to 71, in the Northside Hospital Medical Center waiting room. [...] After the shooting, Patterson fled in a vehicle that he carjacked.

As Veterans Learned the DCCC Had Leaked Their Data, the VA's Tech Chief Was Meeting With His Wife.  She Runs the DCCC.  On Feb. 8, the Air Force informed two Republican political candidates, also military veterans, that their information had been improperly leaked to a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee contractor.  That same day, the Department of Veterans Affairs' chief technology officer met to discuss cybersecurity with his wife, the chairwoman of the DCCC.  "Meet w/Suzan's technology team (account security)" reads the 3:00 p.m. calendar entry on Veterans Affairs assistant secretary Kurt DelBene's official calendar, a reference to his wife, Rep. Suzan DelBene (Wash.), chairwoman of the DCCC.  The calendar entry, a copy of which was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, also contains a link to the DCCC's Zoom account.  Just hours earlier, the Air Force notified the two veterans, Sam Peters and Kevin Dellicker, that a DCCC contractor had duped them into releasing their restricted service records during the 2022 elections.  Both Peters and Dellicker were running for Congress as Republicans when their military records were improperly obtained by a Democratic opposition research group, according to campaign disclosures.  The House Weaponization Committee launched an investigation into the breach of military service records in March.

How is anything improved by misquoting Lincoln?
Biden's VA Axes Lincoln Quote in 50 Percent of Facilities, Replaces with PC Version.  The Department of Veterans Affairs is changing its mission statement.  The new motto, announced in a Thursday news release, includes a gender-neutral change from the previous mission statement.  The old motto referenced both male and female veterans and featured a direct quote from President Abraham Lincoln:  "To fulfill President Lincoln's promise 'to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan' by serving and honoring the men and women who are America's veterans."  The new mission statement reads as follows:  "To fulfill President Lincoln's promise to care for those who have served in our nation's military and for their families, caregivers, and survivors."  The quote included in the original mission statement — and merely referenced in the new one — is from Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address in 1865, pledging to care for those who served the nation in the Civil War.

Veterans Affairs Made $307M in Duplicate Payments.  From Jan. 1, 2017 to March 31, 2021, the Veterans Heath Administration, under the control of the Department of Veterans Affairs, made more than 425,000 duplicate payments that cost taxpayers more than $307 million, according to a VA Department Inspector General report.  According to the report, the Veterans Health Administration oversees veterans' healthcare for the VA.  When it authorizes community care for a veteran who is eligible for both VHA and Medicare benefits, VHA is responsible for paying for that care even when Medicare also covers the same service, which has lead to the duplicate payments.

DOJ Has VA Suspend All Benefits of Jan. 6 Prisoner.  Just when the wife of one incarcerated Jan. 6 prisoner believed things couldn't get worse, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) informed her they are going to suspend all of her husband's benefits.  According to United States Representative Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), "this is what you have when vindictive leftists get in charge of major parts of the government."  In an unsigned letter from the VA — dated June 13 and appearing to originate from the "Director Regional Office," — Angel and Kenneth Harrelson were notified that the administration "received information from the United States Department of Justice" that Kenneth had been "indicted and charged with Seditious Conspiracy (18 U.S.C 2384)."

Vietnam veteran suffers brain bleed after VA 'patient advocate' goes 'Mike Tyson' on him.  Startling surveillance video purports to show a Department of Veterans Affairs patient advocate allegedly grabbing an elderly veteran by the neck, throwing him to the floor, and stomping him twice.  "He was Mike Tyson-ing me there," the victim claimed.  Based on the 30-second clip, and there may be additional, as-yet-undisclosed facts and recordings to follow, it appears that the victim may have made first contact with the VA worker with his left hand.  Whether that justified the alleged beatdown that followed is another matter entirely.

Disturbing Video Shows Veterans Affairs Employee Brutally Assault Elderly Vietnam Vet.  Disturbing video shows the moments a Veterans Affairs employee pushed an elderly Vietnam veteran into a door and body-slammed him to the ground.  Channel 2 Investigative Reporter Justin Gray first reported on the attack in May.  Phillip Webb, 73, said he was attacked at the Department of Veterans Affairs Clinic at Fort McPherson in Atlanta on April 28.  Gray had to file a Freedom of Information Act request and wait more than a month and a half to get the surveillance video, which shows a VA patient advocate viciously hit and kick Webb.  VA employee Lawrence F. Gaillard Jr. was arrested and charged with a brutal beating.  [Video clip]

VA hospital turned away dying vet when they couldn't verify his military service.  A Veterans Affairs hospital in Florida refused to provide emergency care to a veteran who was dying of heart failure because hospital staff could not confirm his military service, a report the Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General (OIG) published on Tuesday revealed.  The incident took place at the Malcom Randall VA Medical Center in Gainesville, Fla., in summer 2020, when first responders transported "an unresponsive patient" to the facility's Emergency Department.

Mayorkas reveals insane plan to divert VA resources from health care for veterans to serve illegals at the border.  In addition to being an immoral betrayal of our pledge to care for those who served us in uniform and politically insane, this diversion if resources would be unnecessary if Biden fulfilled his oath of office and enforced the law.

Critics Blast Biden Admin Attempt to Use Veteran Resources for Border Crisis.  During his recent testimony before Congress, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas informed lawmakers that the Biden administration was considering diverting resources from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to deal with Biden's border debacle.  This includes not just funding but also VA nurses and doctors who are tasked with caring for America's veterans, and who may now be sent to care for illegal immigrants.  It's a ludicrous idea and a terrible decision that Biden seems ready to make.  Veterans' health care has struggled in the past — notably during the last time Biden was in the White House as Vice President in the Obama administration.  America's veterans deserve the best possible care as a small benefit in return for their service to our country and defense of our freedom.  But Biden thinks those who care for veterans can just be shuffled around as his administration flails about trying to handle the border crisis his policies created.  One that's about to get much worse if Biden succeeds in terminating Title 42.

Mayorkas looks to divert VA funding to illegal immigrants.  When Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas recently unveiled his "six pillar plan" for dealing with the crisis on our southern border, he certainly didn't mention this truly awful idea.  During his recent testimony before Congress, Mayorkas slipped in one option that Joe Biden is reportedly considering.  In order to provide better care for the tens of thousands of illegal aliens streaming across the border, the White House is looking at the possibility of diverting funding from the Veterans Administration for that situation.  Additionally, some of the doctors and nurses tasked with caring for our veterans could be reassigned to providing care for the illegals.

How opportunists got rich off COVID-19 pandemic by stealing our money.  On Saturday, April 26, 2020, Robert Stewart Jr., a 33-year-old contractor from Virginia, invited an investigative reporter to take a trip on his private jet.  "I'm talking with you against the advice of my attorney," Stewart laughed, before bringing J. David McSwane aboard a luxury Legacy 450 Flexjet, which he'd rented to deliver six million N95 masks during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Stewart had recently landed a $34.5 million contract with the US Department of Veterans Affairs, which operates the nation's largest network of hospitals, promising to provide them with enough of the medical-grade (and at the time, scarce) masks to meet the overwhelming demand.  Problem was, there were no masks aboard the plane.

Rep. Steube Sends Letter to VA Demanding Answers on Threats to Veterans Over Leftist Code on Gender Issues.  The Biden administration has shown to have a proven woke agenda on gender issues, going so far as to threaten those who don't adhere to accepting certain lifestyles.  This has even expanded to the military, where veterans can be stripped of hard-earned benefits if they don't adhere to a code of conduct.  Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) has made it clear that he is putting the administration on notice when it comes to such "immoral and potentially illegal" actions, though.  Steube is himself a veteran, as are many of the other signatories who signed onto a Friday [4/1/2022] letter to Secretary of Veteran Affairs Denis McDonough provided to Townhall.  Rep. Steube's letter to Secretary McDonough calls the secretary out for a November 9, 2021 letter from McDonough, on department letterhead, that threatens to withhold access to services, as well as threaten to hold them "accountable for their actions" if they engage in behavior, which among other things, amounts to "disruptive" behavior.  The term "disruptive" is not defined, however.

Veterans Affairs bureaucrats are keeping vets from using health care outside its troubled system.  Seven years ago, while suffering from excruciating pain, I attempted to make a primary-care appointment at a VA hospital.  In the week between Christmas and New Year's, no one at my Durham, N.C., VA facility answered the phone.  In January, it took two weeks to get a new provider assigned and an appointment scheduled.  The earliest they could offer was April 15, 90 days out.  At that point, inflamed joints throbbing, I asked if I could use my Choice card, which had arrived in November with the promise it gave me access to private, local health care in the event "the Veteran is told by his/her local VA medical facility that he/she will need to wait more than 30 days from his/her preferred date or the date medically determined by his/her physician."  No dice.  The Veterans Choice Program was enacted by law in the wake of the 2014 VA wait-time scandal.  Nevertheless, the VA denied me the Choice option until after my appointment in 90 days.

More than 15,000 Veterans Affairs patients dead from COVID-19.  There have been more than 15,000 Veterans Affairs patients who have died from the coronavirus since the onset of the pandemic.  More than 2,200 of the deaths came since the beginning of August, the Army Times reported.  The VA death total does not include more than 200 department employees who have died from the virus.

Covid Hoax:  Study reveals 40-45% of coronavirus hospitalizations are actually due to other causes.  Big Pharma and mainstream media have made it seem like getting vaccinated is the key to ending the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19).  Now, government officials are also mandating vaccinations even among people who don't wish to get inoculated, forcing some to choose between losing their jobs or getting vaccinated against their will.  However, study reveals that the recorded rates of coronavirus hospitalizations have been exaggerated — no doubt to strike fear into an already panicking and misinformed public.  The shocking study, called "The COVID-19 Hospitalization Metric in the Pre- and Post-vaccination Eras as a Measure of Pandemic Severity:  A Retrospective, Nationwide Cohort Study," has examined admissions data of patients in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) healthcare system from March 1 to June 30.  While the study is available for preprint only, meaning it still hasn't been peer-reviewed, it clearly shows that there are people trying to manipulate data about hospitalization rates throughout America.

VA Employee Tweets Out Details of a Surgery No Vet Would Want Public.  An administrative officer at the Washington, D.C., Veterans Affairs Medical Center is under investigation for tweeting details of a veteran's surgery and mocking the procedure as a waste of taxpayer money.  The employee, who works in the hospital's anesthesia department, posted a screenshot of a note about the procedure — a penile implant for a veteran patient with erectile dysfunction.

Another Study Shows Hospitalization Numbers of COVID Patients in U.S. are Overinflated.  Interesting data on SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) being released and discussed today [9/13/2021].  The first is the release of a study indicating that half of all recorded hospitalization cases for COVID-19 are incorrectly being interpreted.  The study of 50,000 VA patients recorded as hospitalized and testing positive for COVID-19, reflects that roughly half of the patients recorded on the dashboard were admitted to the hospital for some other, unrelated, reason and incidentally tested positive for the virus upon admission.  They arrived for treatment for something else, were tested and recorded for COVID, but the treatment was not for any COVID-19 related issue.  An earlier study in May, using the charts of hospitalized pediatric patients found roughly the same thing; 40 to 45 percent of the patients recorded as COVID hospitalizations, when in reality they were in the hospital for something unrelated to COVID.

Veterans Affairs suicide hotline received more than 35,000 calls during Afghanistan evacuation.  The Veterans Affairs suicide hotline received an increase in calls during the final two weeks of the U.S. military's withdrawal from Afghanistan.  Veterans placed more than 35,000 calls to the Veterans Crisis Line between Aug. 13 and 29, according to VA data provided to the Washington Examiner, which coincides with the time period in which the U.S. military and coalition forces were embarking on what would become one of the largest airlifts in history as they worked around the clock to evacuate foreign nationals and Afghan allies who could be at risk under the Taliban regime.

The quality of care at the VA hospital is about to get even worse.
Department of Veterans Affairs becomes the first federal agency to issue vaccine mandate.  The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) on Monday become the first federal agency to require its frontline health care workers to be vaccinated.  President Joe Biden confirmed the move in a brief statement to reporters Monday afternoon [7/26/2021].  'Yes.  Veteran Affairs is going to in fact require that all docs working in facilities are going to have to be vaccinated,' Biden said, following a report quoting his Veterans Affairs secretary regarding health care workers at the VA.

7,000 troops died in the Post-9/11 wars.  A staggering 30,000 died by suicide.  The number of veterans and service members who have died by suicide since Sept. 11, 2001 is more than quadruple the number who have died in Post-9/11 wars, according to a new study released on Monday by Brown University's Costs of War project.  The study estimates that 7,057 service members have been killed in post-9/11 war operations, while 30,177 active duty service members and veterans have died by suicide. [...] The average suicide rate for post-9/11 veterans between 18 to 34 was 32.3 per 100,000 between 2005 and 2017, but it rose to 45.9 per 100,000 in 2018.  That's about 2.5 times the suicide rate of that of the general population, which is 18 per 100,000.

The VA is getting into the business of transgender slice-and-dice surgery.  Over the weekend, the VA Secretary announced that American taxpayers will have to pay for the slice-and-dice surgery that passes for "gender confirmation" for so-called transgender people.  While I would willingly support psychotherapy for those poor people who reject their own bodies and hormone treatments to align their brains with their biological bodies, to have to pay to have healthy bodies mutilated is outrageous. [...] Those with gender dysphoria are obviously unhappy and we do consider depression a mental illness — so why shouldn't we give them plastic surgery to cheer them up?  Well, first of all, it doesn't cheer them up.  Even after the surgery, so-called transgender people continue to have horrific suicide rates.  More fundamentally, this entire approach to so-called transgenderism is nonsensical.

Biden's VA secretary tells Pride event the government will pay for free gender reassignment surgery for up to 4,000 transgender vets.  Transgender veterans will be offered gender confirmation surgery paid for by the US Department of Veterans' Affairs, its secretary announced Saturday [6/19/2021].  Denis McDonough told an event in Orlando to celebrate Pride Month that the move was 'the right thing to do'.  He spoke a week after the fifth anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting in the Florida city, which saw 49 people killed at the gay bar.

Remember the Atomic Veterans Who Died for Their Country.  My father, Wesley L. Smith, died for his country from the health consequences of military service.  But his country not only denied that he made the ultimate sacrifice, but VA administrators lied about what happened to avoid paying my mother duly owed benefits.  You see, my father was an "Atomic Veteran," defined by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, in part, as a former member of the armed forces who "participated in an above-ground nuclear test 1945-1962."

Sentencing set in insulin injection deaths of 7 VA patients.  Sentencing is set this week for a fired nursing assistant who admitted to killing seven elderly veterans with fatal doses of insulin at a West Virginia hospital.  Still a mystery is what provoked Reta Mays to commit the crimes.  Mays pleaded guilty last year to intentionally killing the patients with wrongful insulin injections at the Louis A. Johnson VA Medical Center in Clarksburg.  She faces up to life in prison for each of seven counts of second-degree murder when she is sentenced Tuesday [5/11/2021] in federal court.

Muslim Brotherhood Supporter Named VA Secretary.  The U.S. Senate just confirmed Denis McDonough to be the new Secretary of the Veterans Administration.  McDonough has a long history of openly supporting jihadis while in public office.  The counter-terrorism policies and strategies created under his watch as Deputy National Security Advisor and Chief of Staff under President Obama demonstrate his overt support for individuals and entities who openly call for the overthrow of the U.S. government and the destruction of liberty and innocent life.  McDonough's seditious and unlawful actions are unprecedented in their brazenness and blatant violation of his oath and the law.  For instance, as the Deputy National Security Advisor to President Obama, McDonough went to the Muslim Brotherhood's mosque, the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS) in Sterling, Virginia with senior U.S. leaders including FBI, DHS, NSC, etc to PRAISE its imam.  The ADAMS Center imam is Mohamed Magid, a Muslim Brotherhood leader.

Let Me Tell You a Story About a Veteran Who Died Waiting for His VA Disability Payments.  I work with veterans every day, and I'm getting some new cases coming into my office for veterans disability benefits from Vietnam vets.  Why didn't they apply decades ago?  Because they thought they could handle things themselves, that they could work through the pain from residual injuries.  Such was the case of David (not his real name) who had received a serious neck and shoulder injury while on deployment in Vietnam.  He didn't file for benefits until 2013, when the pain could no longer be avoided, and he lost his job because of it.  He filled out the necessary paperwork within a month of losing his job and then waited while it weaved through the bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

2 Workers Dead, 1 Person Missing in VA Hospital Blast.  An apparent steam explosion Friday [11/13/2020] in a maintenance building at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Connecticut killed a VA employee and a contractor and left a third person missing, officials said.  "We received a report this morning that an explosion occurred at the West Haven campus of the VA Connecticut Healthcare System that resulted in two deaths in a non-patient care area," VA Secretary Robert Wilkie said in a statement.

This Obama-Biden Administration Failure Killed More Americans (and Veterans!) Than COVID-19.  [Scroll down]  There's nothing to gloat about in Joe Biden's leadership ability.  In addition to flip-flopping on multiple COVID-19 issues, his incompetence as vice president still has a higher death toll than the pandemic.  In 2009, the Obama-Biden administration promised to end the horrendous backlog in VA benefits claims, some of which had languished for years.  But instead, under their leadership, the backlog skyrocketed.  Unprocessed claims exceeded 900,000. Roughly two-thirds of all claims idled for 125 days or longer.  From 2011 to 2013, the time it took to process claims increased 40 percent, to a devastatingly long 272 days.  And the Obama-Biden administration did nothing, even as this backlog surge resulted in the number of veterans dying waiting for care and benefits skyrocketing.  After reports of vets dying while waiting for care started getting attention, the Obama-Biden administration tried to cover up the full extent of the scandal, and courageous whistleblowers found themselves targeted by the administration for retaliation.

This Obama-Biden Administration Failure Killed More Americans Than COVID-19.  The Veterans Affairs Department was notorious for its poorly managed health care system, and the Obama-Biden administration promised to end the horrendous backlog in VA benefits claims, some of which languished for years.  But the backlog of VA claims, which had been on the decline when Obama and Biden took office, skyrocketed on their watch.  Unprocessed claims exceeded 900,000, with roughly two-thirds of all claims idling for 125 days or longer.  From 2011 to 2013, the time it took to process claims increased 40 percent, to an unthinkable 272 days.  As a result of this backlog surge the number of veterans who died waiting for care and benefits skyrocketed.  And the Obama-Biden administration did nothing.  Even after reports of vets dying waiting for care started getting attention, the administration didn't seem interested in solving the problem.

The Editor says...
Barack H. Obama detests the U.S. military, and doesn't care about veterans.

Veteran missing for a month found dead in stairwell at Bedford VA hospital.  A body found in a stairwell at the Bedford Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Massachusetts is a veteran who lived at the facility and disappeared more than a month ago.  The victim was a 62-year-old former homeless veteran who was reported missing May 13 — five days after he was last seen.  His name wasn't released.  "It appears that he's been there from the eighth of May," Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan said, according to WBZ-TV.  She called what happened "very concerning."  Residents told the station some exits have been blocked off to contain the coronavirus.  They wondered if that's why nobody found him in the stairwell.

Liberals Still Think Obama Was the 'Best President Ever,' Here Are 14 Reasons Why That's Ridiculous.  [#3] Hundreds of thousands of veterans died because of him.  The Veterans Health Administration is notorious for large backlogs of benefits claims.  While running for president, Obama promised to do better than his predecessor and reduce the backlog.  When he took office, the backlog had been in decline, falling by nearly 100,00 during George W. Bush's second term.  Sadly, under Obama, the backlog started going back up — more than doubling during his first term, from approximately 390,000 outstanding claims to roughly 884,000 outstanding claims.  The backlog increase caused the number of veterans dying while waiting to receive care to skyrocket.  Attorney General Eric Holder refused to investigate the problem.  Want to know why?  Because the Obama-Biden transition team had been warned about the VA using secret lists to hide the true state of the backlog, and was warned twice more in 2010 and again in 2012, but they did nothing about it, letting the problem spiral out of control.  Approximately 307,000 veterans died while waiting for medical treatment from the Obama administration, and liberals don't seem to care.

Surprise: Capitalism in Medicine Trounces Socialism.  I've been practicing medicine for over 30 years under various economic systems.  The V.A. I worked at is almost a liberty-free, hard-left system, with doctors and patients grinding through the day under piles of government laws regarding when, where, how much, and who will get medical care.  The waste and inefficiencies are in plain sight there.  Its socialist organization is why thousands of our precious veterans have died prematurely or suffered intolerable waits for the expensive and generally mediocre care of the V.A. system.

Trump slams ousted VA workers, touts reforms to veterans services at Memorial Day ceremony.  President Trump slammed workers from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) who have been fired under his administration in comments Friday [5/22/2020] at a White House Memorial Day ceremony to remember prisoners of war and deceased veterans.  In his wide-ranging but brief comments, the president also paid tribute to fallen American service members, spoke about "rebuilding" the military, touched on reopening houses of worship during the coronavirus pandemic, and mentioned the criticism he received over his order to ban incoming travel from China during the initial phases of the disease's outbreak.  Trump praised Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert Wilkie before touting the reforms his administration has made to the department and slamming how it was previously run.

No. 2 VA official fired.  Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Deputy Secretary James Byrne was fired on Monday, just five months after being confirmed for the job by the Senate.  "Today, I dismissed VA Deputy Secretary James Byrne due to loss of confidence in Mr. Byrne's ability to carry out his duties.  This decision is effective immediately," VA Secretary Robert Wilkie said in a statement.  The statement provided no elaboration on why Wilkie lost confidence in Byrne or the circumstances surrounding his ouster.  A VA spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for elaboration.

Woman Claims Veteran Dad Was Bitten 100 Times by Ants Before Death at VA Medical Center.  A Vietnam vet stricken with cancer was bitten more than 100 times by ants days before he died at a VA hospital in Atlanta, claimed his daughter.  Laquna Ross spotted red bite marks and swelling when she visited her father, Joel Marrable, who served in the U.S. Air Force, at the Eagle's Nest Community Living Center at the Atlanta VA Medical Center.  Ross told the New York Daily News that she hadn't seen her father in about 11 days when she visited him.  "When I took his hand out, it was really swollen, and he flinched," she recalled.  "I was really worried and asked a staffer if she could come take a look."

Congressman, A Double-Amputee Vet, Speaks About VA Kicking Him Out Of His Office In Florida VA.  On Thursday, Congressman Brian Mast (R-FL), a double-amputee war vet, spoke with Fox News about being kicked out of a West Palm Beach, Florida, VA facility where he had established the first office in a VA facility for a sitting member of Congress.  In 2017, Mast opened the first ever Congressional office inside a VA facility, an action imitated by other congressmen.  He had recently confronted VA officials about a shooting and suicide at the West Palm Beach VA.

How Veterans Affairs failed to stop a pathologist who misdiagnosed 3,000 cases.  By the time he and his wife Sara faced Veterans Affairs medical staff across a conference table in September, Kelly Copelin had lost 75 pounds and could swallow only small pieces of solid food.  Radiation therapy had blistered his throat.  This was the moment they would finally learn why their lives were so changed.  Why when he went to the Fayetteville VA three years earlier with a severe earache, the biopsy came back negative — and he was given antibiotics instead of treatment for what was diagnosed 13 months later as late-stage neck and throat cancer.  The pathologist who had misdiagnosed Copelin's diseased tissue in 2015 was intoxicated, the hospital's chief physician told the couple.  He had failed to see the squamous cell carcinoma on the slide before him, the doctor said.

Pence joins the fight for religious freedom and Bible displays in VA hospitals.  In May, First Liberty Institute, a legal organization based in Texas, sent a letter to the Department of Veterans Affairs urging a policy clarification after an individual filed a lawsuit challenging a POW/MIA remembrance display at the Manchester VA Medical Center that includes a Bible.  First Liberty's client, the Northeast POW/MIA Network, is the organization responsible for creating and maintaining that remembrance display.  A few months later, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced that it has updated and clarified its policies "permitting religious literature, symbols and displays at VA facilities to protect religious liberty for Veterans and families while ensuring inclusivity and nondiscrimination."

Rev. Graham Applauds VP Pence -- 'The Bible Stays' at VA Under Trump Administration.  Evangelical leader Franklin Graham praised Vice President Mike Pence for defending religious freedom at Veterans Affairs hospitals in a recent speech, where Pence said, "Under this administration, VA hospitals will not be religion-free zones."  In an Aug. 29 post on Facebook, Rev. Graham wrote, "'VA hospitals will not be religion-free zones.'  Vice President Mike Pence spoke at the American Legion's 101st National Convention yesterday about all that this administration is doing to help our nation's military veterans."  "He also addressed the issue of a current lawsuit in New Hampshire to remove the Bible of a World War II POW from a VA hospital's 'missing man' table," remarked Graham.  "Vice President Pence said, '...under the last administration, VA hospitals were removing Bibles and even banning Christmas carols in an effort to be politically correct.

The Editor says...
Or perhaps the Bibles were removed because the figurehead of "the last administration" was Barack H. Obama, who exhibits little or no evidence that he is a Christian, and a great deal of evidence to the contrary.

Second homicide identified in string of deaths at VA hospital; family 'floored'.  When federal investigators contacted the Shaw family at their farm in rural West Virginia last winter, they had an unusual request:  They wanted to exhume the body of George Nelson Shaw, Sr., who had died several months earlier, to examine his body for foul play.  The family had thought his death was suspicious.  They didn't understand how in just a few weeks the retired Air Force veteran had gone from bowling to hospice at the local VA medical center.  Last month, investigators returned to the 111-acre farm to tell the family what they had learned:  Shaw had not died of natural causes.  He had been killed — one of a string of suspicious deaths at the hospital.

VA secretary rejects Obama religious expression rules: 'They did not know the makeup of the force'.  Robert Wilkie, the soft-spoken and managerial-minded secretary of Veterans Affairs, went public in a big way this summer when he said he refused to be "bullied" by a federal lawsuit claiming a Bible on display at a New Hampshire VA hospital violated the separation of church and state.  In an interview with The Washington Times in his office at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Mr. Wilkie said displaying a Bible in a VA hospital is a matter of liberty and that the Obama administration erred in trying to eliminate religious symbols from the veterans health care system.

Leaving the Democrats.  I watched my father get [very] poor treatment at the VA hospital, waiting months to get appointments and then just handed more drugs.  He struggled with issues from Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam.  He had back surgery there without any physical therapy follow-up.  He could not straighten out his back to lie down or stand up straight after the surgery.  He died in 2011 after having to live and sleep in his easy chair for years due to the pain.  I want to say he was taken care of for life as promised years before without sounding sarcastic.  But I can't.

Warning: How the VA 'Red-Flags' Patriots.  Gun-grabbing crisis vultures just can't let the latest mass shootings go to waste.  "Red flag" laws are now all the rage in the Beltway as the magic pill to prevent homicidal maniacs from wreaking havoc on the nation.  Even President Donald Trump has endorsed the idea of preemptively confiscating people's firearms if they are deemed a "threat."  But if you want to know how this American version of China's social credit system would work in practice, let me remind you of how Veterans Affairs recklessly red-flags "disruptive" citizens without due process, transparency or accountability in the name of "safety."  Government bureaucrats routinely deprive our nation's heroes of medical treatment based on arbitrary definitions of who and what constitutes a mental health menace.

10 Things Democrats Want to Take Away.  [#9] VA accountability:  When a veteran contacts the VA, they should have the red carpet rolled out for them.  We passed the Department of Veterans Affairs Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act of 2017, which created a streamlined and efficient process to remove, demote or suspend any VA employee for poor performance or misconduct.  Additionally, the VA MISSION Act consolidated the VA's multiple community care programs and authorities and provides further funding to sustain the Choice Program so veterans can get the care they earned and deserve.  But let's not forget why these bills were necessary in the first place.  Under the Obama administration's ineffective leadership, veterans died waiting in line at the VA, never having the chance to see a doctor.  Where was the oversight?  A disgusted and horrified Republican-led Congress passed legislation to address the culture and lack of oversight within the agency, which the Obama VA later gutted and rendered effectively useless.  With President Trump's VA, and this unified Republican government, we are working to fulfill our promises to our heroes and return the VA to its sole mission:  serving veterans.

VA may owe veterans millions in refunds but knowingly hasn't paid them for years, probe finds.  More than 50,000 disabled veterans could be owed as much as $190 million in refunds from the Department of Veterans Affairs for home loan fees they were wrongly charged or no longer owe, an investigation has found.  Senior leaders knew about the problem for years but didn't ensure veterans received what they are due, the investigation by the VA inspector general found.

A better VA, with mental health services, is essential for America's veterans.  In our nation's history, more than 1 million American servicemembers have been killed in U.S. wars.  For the past 151 years on the fourth Monday of May, we have honored the great soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen who have fallen.  Much has changed, but the generations of brave men and women willing to make the ultimate sacrifice in the name of freedom have endured, and the sanctity with which we regard these individuals has remained.  There are many millions of veterans, however, who returned home from war to find a country unable to provide them access to basic human rights such as quality civilian employment opportunities, health care and education.  In recent years alone, 20.4 million men and women risked their lives for their country and, in return, many were refused fundamental care by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).  President Trump has renewed the fight for these veterans.

Why Have Department of Defense Suicides Spiked?  The Department of Defense has a suicide problem.  Thank Presidents Clinton and Obama[.]  Prior to 1993, the Department of Defense (DOD) used to screen recruits, officer candidates, and service academy entrants for mental, personality, and suicide behavior disorders.  Now they don't. [...] When men and women had enlistment physicals, they were evaluated by a physician for obvious physical defects and to also see if they had an apparent mental or personality disorder.  Any potential recruit screened with mental, personality, and suicide (and a range of other) behavior disorders were considered unfit for service.  Then President Clinton signed the Don't Ask, Don't Tell law.  DOD's policy that screened for personality disorders and mental illnesses during the pre-enlistment physical was terminated as a function of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell law.  The law removed all screening for DSM categories of homosexuality, sexual and personality disorders and mental illnesses.

Never content to merely single-down...
Ocasio-Cortez Doubles Down, Says VA Problems Are a 'Myth'.  Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) reinforced her opposition to reforming the Department of Veterans Affairs on Saturday [4/27/2019], calling it a "myth" that the system was broken and in need of reform.  Ocasio-Cortez pledged at a town hall a week ago that she would fight bipartisan efforts to reform the scandal-plagued VA health system.

Ocasio-Cortez claim that Trump wants to privatize VA is 'nonsense,' VA secretary tells Fox.  Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert Wilkie struck back at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., on Wednesday [4/24/2019], calling her accusations that the Trump administration wants to privatize the VA "nonsense." [...] "If we are privatizing VA, we are going about it in a very strange way," Wilkie said.  "I presented to the Congress a $220 billion budget, the largest budget in the history of the department.  We are undergoing basic reforms to make the VA a modern, 21st-century health care administration.  But what we are doing is opening the aperture on choice, so that our veterans remain at the center their own health care, and if VA can provide what they need, we will give them the opportunity to go out into the private sector."

Ocasio-Cortez declares VA 'isn't broken,' already provides top-notch care.  Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., claimed during a recent town hall event that the Department of Veterans Affairs "isn't broken" and is actually providing "some of the highest quality" care to veterans.  "All I can think of is that classic refrain that my parents always taught me growing up, is that: 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it,'" she said in New York, as part of her argument against privatizing aspects of the scandal-scarred agency's work.

AOC praises chronically dysfunctional VA:'If it ain't broke, don't fix it'.  Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is making headlines this week for praising the efficacy of the still-chronically dysfunctional Department of Veterans Affairs.  And by the VA, I mean the people-have-died-waiting-in-line VA. You know, the one that was subject to recent national scandals involving everything from frivolous purchases to pill mills, to employee theft of tens of thousands of dollars, to disease outbreaks, to making veterans wait for doctors' appointments.  The one whose acting secretary resigned in disgrace in 2014 amid the mismanagement scandals.  Even more astonishing than her praise is that it came in the context of her arguing against reforming the federal agency.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims the VA system has the 'highest quality care,' doesn't need to be fixed.  Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said during a town hall in New York City that she thought people needed to stop talking about fixing the Department of Veterans Affairs.  The VA, she argued, "provides some of the highest quality care to our veterans" and "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

The Editor says...
I doubt if AOC has ever seen the inside of a VA hospital.  In fact, I think it's unlikely that she has ever seen the outside of a VA hospital.

Vet commits suicide in front of hundreds at VA clinic in Texas.  A veteran ended his life in the waiting room at a VA clinic in Austin, Texas on Tuesday [4/9/2019].  The veteran, who has not yet been identified, was referred to a local VA hospital but then transferred to the Austin Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic and took his own life before hundreds of witnesses, KWTX News reported.  "When he found out he couldn't get the help he needed there, he chose to take his own life," McLennan County Veteran's Service Officer Steve Hernandez said.

2 veterans die by suicide at VA hospitals in GA over the weekend.  Two veterans took their own lives in Georgia VA hospitals in non-related incidents over the weekend.  These two suicides come in the midst of an increasing number of veteran suicides and what the VA said is its "highest clinical priority," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.  The first of the two suicides occurred Friday at the Carl Vinson VA Medical Center in Dublin in a parking garage.  The second suicide happened Saturday at the Atlanta VA Medical Center in Decatur just outside the main entrance.

VA Evicts Groups that Help Vets; Dog Park, Baseball Stadium, Prep School Athletic Fields, Upscale Store Parking Stay.  The Los Angeles Veterans Affairs (VA) facility that illegally rents its sprawling grounds to institutions that don't serve veterans just evicted several groups dedicated to veterans, including a nonprofit that for decades has comforted dying vets and another that helps those who are disabled.  While the VA gave the volunteer organizations the boot without offering an explanation, it continues housing a parking lot for nearby upscale shops, a university baseball stadium, a dog park for the professional dog walkers of affluent residents, and athletic fields for a fancy prep school.  It marks the latest of several scandals involving the misuse of this VA property, where a top official pleaded guilty to multiple felonies last year for taking bribes from a parking lot operator that defrauded the agency out of millions.

Four former VA Secretaries:  There's an historic and welcome transformation underway at the VA.  The VA excels in large part because of an army of dedicated civil servants and close relationships with academic institutions and research entities that work collaboratively with the VA to bring excellent care to veterans.  And when the VA has not been able to deliver acceptable care or in cases where veterans live too far from VA services, Congress has generously funded and expanded the VA's Community Care Program so veterans can see private doctors closer to home.

Helpful reforms are on the way at Veterans Affairs.  "Privatization," we noted two years ago, "is a classic scare-word among liberals."  We were pointing out that the Department of Veterans Affairs, after its disgraceful neglect of veterans was first revealed in a series of scandals earlier this decade, had no leg to stand on in arguing that VA patients should not be allowed to seek care from private healthcare providers.  Our frustration at the lack of reform led us to excoriate then-President Barack Obama, arguing that he was "offering veterans no way out.  He won't fix the agency which is meant to provide their benefits, and plainly intends to stop private medicine stepping into the breach to make up for its shortcomings."

V.A. Seeks to Redirect Billions of Dollars Into Private Care.  The Department of Veterans Affairs is preparing to shift billions of dollars from government-run veterans' hospitals to private health care providers, setting the stage for the biggest transformation of the veterans' medical system in a generation.  Under proposed guidelines, it would be easier for veterans to receive care in privately run hospitals and have the government pay for it.  Veterans would also be allowed access to a system of proposed walk-in clinics, which would serve as a bridge between V.A. emergency rooms and private providers, and would require co-pays for treatment.

An Opportunity to Roll Back the Administrative State.  Earlier this month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that might well have major implications for administrative law.  The case is Kisor v. Wilkie, in which a Marine seeks retroactive benefits for his PTSD.  Why is this case so important?  Because, as David French explains, it turns on the deference, if any, the VA's interpretation of the word "relevant" in the applicable federal regulations should receive.  French explains that, under current law, courts defer to an agency's reasonable interpretation of its own ambiguous regulation.  This means that the administrative state receives the benefit of the doubt twice.

By the time I saw my VA doctor, he said it was too late.  As I sat in the Phoenix Veterans Affairs hospital on Dec. 21, 2012, I had no idea my life was about to change.  I'd seen a nurse practitioner in 2011 and was finally consulting with a VA urologist almost a year later.  I knew something was wrong, but I wasn't prepared for the diagnosis I was about to receive.  "You've got one of the worst cases of prostate cancer I've ever seen in my life," the urologist said to me.  "Hospice will call you Monday morning."

'Union business on the taxpayer's dime': Trump administration cracks down on 'official time' at VA.  The Department of Veterans Affairs this week will stop paying employees in health care jobs for time spent on union activities as the Trump administration cracks down on the practice known as "official time," which costs taxpayers more than $100 million per year.  The VA policy will prevent about 430 unionized physicians, registered nurses, dentists and other agency employees from performing union representation duties such as handling grievances and negotiations.  It takes effect Thursday [11/15/2018].

VA: Fatal dog experiments moving ahead despite criticism from Congress, veterans groups.  The Department of Veterans Affairs is pushing forward with invasive and ultimately fatal experiments on dogs as part of the VA's medical research program, according to documents obtained by USA Today.  The controversial procedures previously sparked outrage and opposition from some veterans' advocates and prompted strict restrictions from Congress.  The VA says the studies could produce discoveries that may help veterans suffering from spinal cord or breathing problems.

Union demands investigation of VA official who displayed painting of KKK leader.  Union leaders are calling for a full investigation into a senior Department of Veterans Affairs official who displayed a picture of the first Ku Klux Klan figurehead in his office, and say VA leadership is ignoring the issue.  The photo belongs to David Thomas Sr., deputy executive director of VA's Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization, which certifies veteran-owned businesses seeking government contracts.  The painting depicted Nathan Bedford Forrest, a confederate general who became the KKK's first grand wizard in 1868.  Thomas claims he did not know Forrest's background before a Washington Post reporter pointed it out to him.  He says he has now removed the painting following a Washington Post report.

The Editor says...
One may easily presume that a picture of former Klansman Robert Byrd would have been okay.

VA wrongly denied benefits for victims of military sexual trauma: report.  The Department of Veteran Affairs wrongly denied benefits for thousands of veterans who claimed they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder relating to a sexual assault that occurred during their military service, a new government watchdog report found.  The Office of Inspector General found that nearly half of the cases brought forward by veterans who claimed they suffer from sexual assault-related PTSD were not properly processed by VA staff.

A $2.2 million loss:
Failed VA wind turbine to be torn down in 2019.  A failed wind turbine at the St. Cloud VA Medical Center will be torn down. [...] The turbine was built in 2011 and never produced any energy for the VA.

Trump Swears In New VA Secretary.  On Monday [7/30/2018], President Donald Trump swore Robert Wilkie in as Veterans Affairs secretary in a ceremony at the White House.  However, all anyone seemed to notice was the particular Bible that Wilkie's wife was holding the whole time.

Senate confirms Robert Wilkie as VA secretary, capping contentious selection process.  Robert Wilkie, acting secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, was confirmed by the Senate to lead the VA on Monday, capping a contentious selection process that saw President Trump's previous nominee fall amid sweeping, unproven misconduct allegations.  Wilkie will lead the government's second-largest department, with 360,000 employees serving 9 million veterans.  The department has been paralyzed by infighting over the role of private care for veterans.  Trump selected Wilkie, who was confirmed 86-9, for the post in May after firing David Shulkin amid investigations into alleged spending abuses and reports of internal dissension at the VA.

A new day is dawning at the Department of Veterans Affairs.  Well into his second year in office, President Trump is seen as a serious man living every day in the White House dedicated to initiating the changes he campaigned on.  Trump Nation sees a fighter on its behalf in the Churchill mode:  "Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense."  Ironically, that is also why his demonstrated over-the-top critics in the MSM are so outraged: because he has been effective so far.

For New Veterans Affairs Chief, That Was the Easy Part.  His confirmation Monday [7/23/2018] drew scrutiny and nine dissenters.  Now Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie must face the real challenge: repairing the sprawling agency that serves the nation's veterans, including 9 million who receive health care benefits through the department.  The second-largest federal agency is embarking on two major initiatives — a reorganization of its private medical care options and a $15.8 billion electronic health records project — at the same time that it seeks to fill key positions overseeing them.

Indiana VA hospital temporarily removes military flags to fly LGBT pride flag.  An Indiana hospital for the Department of Veterans Affairs temporarily removed its military flags to put up an LGBT pride flag Tuesday [6/12/2018].  Some veterans in Fort Wayne, Indiana arrived at the VA hospital Tuesday morning and noticed all the military flags had been removed.  On one of the flagpoles was a rainbow flag, in honor of LGBT pride month, WPTA in Fort Wayne reported.  Some people in the area questioned the VA's decision.

VA hospital allegedly canceled surgeries over fly infestation, report claims.  An investigation into a West Los Angeles veterans hospital is alleging that dozens of surgeries had to be postponed or canceled because of an insect infestation.  According to the report, the VA West Los Angeles Medical Center had more than 200 fly traps installed due to a years-long infestation.

Obama and the VA.  [Scroll down to #751]  In June 2014, it was reported that the Phoenix VA Health Care System spent $20 million on solar panels while as many as 40 of its patients died while waiting for care. [...] [#1071] In 2014, the Obama administration spent $288,000 of taxpayers' money to relocate Diana Rubens, the director of the Philadelphia VA regional benefits office, a distance of 140 miles. [...] [#1269]  In 2013, while veterans were dying due to lack of medical care, the Veterans Administration spent millions of dollars to install solar panels at its facility in Little Rock, Arkansas.  Two years later, the panels were removed and reinstalled to accommodate a new parking garage.  However, the panels were never turned on in either of these installations, because they were incompatible with the local electric grid.

The Editor says...
Is there something exotic about the electricity in Little Rock?

VA hospital investigating after tweets of 'unsanitary' room.  A Veterans Affairs clinic in Salt Lake City is investigating why an Army veteran was put in a room with an overflowing trash can and medical supplies strewn about after the man's father tweeted images of the unclean space.

President Trump is 'considering chief of staff John Kelly to lead Department of Veterans Affairs'.  White House chief of staff John Kelly is being considered for the spot of Veterans Affairs secretary after the president's last pick withdrew his nomination, according to a report.  Trump fired Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin in March, which prompted reports that Kelly was frustrated with the president over Shulkin's ouster.  The president then nominated US Navy Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson to fill the spot of Veterans Affairs (VA) Secretary.  However, Jackson's track record was called into question this week by the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee.

Senate delays hearing for VA nominee amid misconduct allegations.  The Senate will delay the confirmation hearing for secretary of Veterans Affairs nominee Dr. Ronny Jackson amid reported allegations of misconduct.  Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Veterans Affairs committee, asked to have the hearing postponed due to multiple claims of a "hostile work environment," according to CBS News.  The allegations also include "excessive drinking on the job," and "improperly dispensing meds."

VA whistleblowers, under threat, seek help from the outside.  Federal government employees are being intimidated, bullied and threatened with physical violence as they try to blow the whistle on wrongdoing in their agencies — particularly within the Department of Veterans Affairs.  And as some whistleblowers realize that disclosing things through the "proper channels" doesn't always suffice, they are increasingly turning to outside groups for help and support, especially when they start encountering threats on their lives, and those of their loved ones.

A 'Strategic Pause' to Fix the Department of Veterans Affairs.  President Trump actually gave President Obama a vote of confidence in his elevating Dr. David Shulkin in rank from Undersecretary for Veterans Health Administration (VHA) to Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) last year.  Now that Shulkin has been fired, let us all now see how that act of bipartisan comity is going to be repaid with the nomination of Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson USN MD.  Adm. Jackson has said that he will retire from the military upon confirmation, forfeiting as much as $1 million in extra retirement pay that would have followed his pending promotion in rank.

VA dismisses privatization talk after leadership change.  President Donald Trump's decision to dismiss David Shulkin as the secretary of Veterans Affairs stoked speculation that the White House would move swiftly to allow veterans more access to private care outside the VA's health system.  But the agency in a statement on Thursday [4/5/2018] downplayed that possibility, calling suggestions that the agency charged with caring for the nation's veterans was moving in that direction "completely false."

Trump pushes out Shulkin at VA, nominates Jackson as replacement.  President Donald Trump ousted Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin on Wednesday [3/28/2018] in response to heavy criticism and nominated his personal physician, Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, to replace him in the latest turnover among Trump's team.

Trump to replace David Shulkin with Adm.  Ronny Jackson as Veterans Affairs secretary.  President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced his intention to replace Secretary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin with Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson, now the physician to the president.  It marked the latest in a string of swift White House replacements in recent months.  Trump also announced that Robert Wilkie, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, would serve as interim VA secretary, pending Jackson's confirmation.

Veteran kills himself in St. Louis VA hospital waiting room, report says.  An unidentified U.S. military veteran committed suicide Monday in the waiting room of a Veterans Affairs hospital in St. Louis.  Michelle Woodling, a city police officer, said the 62-year-old killed himself inside the John Cochran VA Medical Center about 4:19 a.m., the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.  A U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs spokeswoman told the paper that the agency was "grieved' to confirm that the veteran was found deceased.

These 5 Horrible Bureaucrats Beat the Clock and Kept Their Pensions.  [#5] Susan Taylor:  The Department of Veterans Affairs was a wellspring of scandal even before revelations that hospital administrators were falsifying records to conceal long patient wait times.  In 2010, Taylor, then serving as a procurement officer at the department, helped her married boyfriend's company, FedBid, win a lucrative government contract.  When a co-worker began to suspect something was amiss and the VA's Office of the Inspector General subpoenaed FedBid's internal records, Taylor pleaded with them to drop the case and started working with FedBid to develop a legal strategy to stymie the investigation.  This was not the only illegal favor Taylor did for her lover.  Earlier in her career — and long before she was eligible for retirement — she attempted to shepherd him into the department she was working for at the time, which violated Office of Personnel Management policy.  When all this finally came to light, Taylor resigned and retired with her pension intact.

Give VA Secretary David Shulkin the boot.  Will the VA scandal never end?  While the Department of Veterans Affairs secretary lives high on the hog and his lying chief of staff resigns in disgrace while escaping any punishment, legions of vets every day in this country are denied the medical care they earned.  President Trump was supposed to drain the swamp.  But at the historically fraud-ridden and profligate VA, the alligators continue feasting on the public dime.

Veterans Affairs chief of staff resigns over doctored emails.  The Department of Veterans Affairs says the agency's chief of staff has stepped down after an investigation found she had doctored emails to justify Secretary David Shulkin's wife accompanying him on a European trip at taxpayer expense.  The internal investigation by the department's inspector general found "serious derelictions" by Shulkin and his staff and urged administrative action against Chief of Staff Vivieca Wright Simpson.  Veterans Affairs spokesman Curt Cashour says Simpson "elected to retire" and the VA is opening a formal investigation into her actions.

Tammy Baldwin under fire from conservative veterans group's $1.5 million ad campaign.  Concerned Veterans for America is joining the campaign against Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., a top Republican target in 2018, with a $1.5 million digital and statewide television advertising buy.  Baldwin is up for re-election this year, and this investment from CVA, a group that operates under the umbrella of political groups established by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, highlights what it claims is the Democrat's "failure to address the Tomah VA scandal."

An overlooked bipartisan success story in 2017: VA reform.  For decades, veterans have traded stories of VA incompetence like they were military-exclusive baseball cards.  We were told to wait for months for medical appointments, and resolving other problems was nearly impossible.  The VA billing office was infamous for almost never picking up the phone, even after veterans spent hours on hold.  Yet calling was your only option, as the VA treated email like an alien technology from a distant future.  Multiple news stories confirmed veterans' complaints were not just whining.  Not only were wait-times egregious, but several VA offices had falsified records to meet scheduling goals.

The VA Hired Health Care Workers With Revoked Medical Licenses For Years.  Well, there was more bad news for Veterans Affairs yesterday [12/22/2017].  Apparently, the VA had hired workers with expired medical licenses for the past 15 years.  USA Today reported there was a crossing of the legislative wires in which a 2002 law gave local entities the ability to hire workers as long as they had a valid license in one state.  Yet, a 1999 federal law prohibits any health care worker from working at a VA facility if his or her medical license had been revoked in any state.  Of course, members of Congress are concerned, with one member saying that the VA appears to be a "dumping ground" for these sorts of individuals in the health care industry.  The publication added 31 House members and 14 U.S. Senators have sent letters to VA Secretary David Shulkin expressing their concern.  Shulkin has ordered a compete re-writing of the hiring practices for the VA, along with a nationwide review to find if there are any other health care professionals with revoked licenses working in the VA system.

VA used illegal policy to hire medical workers with revoked licenses for years:  Report.  The Department of Veterans Affairs for years relied on old and illegal policy allowing VA hospitals to hire medical workers even if their licenses had been revoked, according to a USA Today investigation.  In 2002 the VA issued national guidelines giving hospitals the discretion to hire clinicians with revoked licenses after considering the facts of the the situation and as long as the individual still had a license in at least once state.  But three years earlier in 1999, Congress passed a law prohibiting the VA from employing any health care workers whose license has been revoked in any state.  The VA confirmed the existence and use of the 2002 guidelines to USA Today.  Those illegal guidelines, USA Today discovered, have resulted in the hiring of doctors and other health care workers who never should have been employed to take care of veterans.

VA knowingly hires doctors with past malpractice claims, discipline for poor care.  Neurosurgeon John Henry Schneider racked up more than a dozen malpractice claims and settlements in two states, including cases alleging he made surgical mistakes that left patients maimed, paralyzed or dead.  He was accused of costing one patient bladder and bowel control after placing spinal screws incorrectly, he allegedly left another paralyzed from the waist down after placing a device improperly in his spinal canal.  The state of Wyoming revoked his medical license after another surgical patient died.  Schneider then applied for a job earlier this year at the Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Iowa City, Iowa.  He was forthright in his application about the license revocation and other malpractice troubles.  But the VA hired him anyway.

Good Enough for Government Work.  A USA Today invstigation has found the Department of Veterans Affairs has repeatedly hired health care workers who have lost malpractice claims or had disciplinary actions taken against them.

Why Are Federal Bureaucrats Buying Guns And Ammo? $158 Million Spent By Non-Military Agencies.  [Scroll down]  What's curious, however, is that traditionally administrative agencies spent more than $20 million.  Four notable examples: [...] [#3] The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has a relatively new police force.  In 1996, the VA had zero employees with arrest and firearm authority.  Today, the VA has 3,700 officers, armed with millions of dollars' worth of guns and ammunition including AR-15's, Sig Sauer handguns, and semi-automatic pistols.

Social Security pays millions to people VA says are dead.  The Department of Veterans Affairs knew they were dead, but the Social Security Administration kept paying benefits to hundreds of people anyway, according to a new agency audit released Friday [9/1/2017] that says at least $37 million in bogus payments were made.  Investigators compared the VA's record to Social Security rolls and found nearly 4,000 people who were listed as dead by the VA, but were still getting checks.  Some of those people listed as dead were in fact still alive, but others were deceased — and their checks never should have been paid, the Social Security inspector general said.

VA under 3 investigations over report of rushed, botched radiology scans.  [Scroll down]  [Dr. L. Anthony] Leskosky's documentation and claims about similar problems at the Marion VA have sparked investigations by three federal agencies into the Department of Veterans Affairs clinic to see if its radiologists rushed analyses of potentially hundreds of patient scans to boost their pay — even though it resulted in veterans with serious or fatal conditions being untreated.  The investigations follow a report by Leskosky, who initially advised his supervisors of his concerns but was told to keep quiet about the matter.

Heritage Budget Wants to Ax Federal Housing Administration, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  The firing of a federal employee takes about 18 months on average, given the appeals process, which allows multiple avenues for an employee to register complaints.  This was one of the central issues discussed Tuesday [8/22/2017] at the Heritage Foundation, where members of the conservative think tank outlined the organization's Blueprint for Reorganization. [...] Suggestions include the elimination of entire offices like the Federal Housing Administration and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  It also envisions consolidating Veterans Affairs, which has 42 offices specifically focused on health benefits, a setup that was described Tuesday [8/22/2017] as a "bureaucratic nightmare" for veterans.

Trump signs vets bill to keep veterans choice program afloat.  President Trump on Saturday signed a bill that will pump funds into the Veterans choice program to keep it up and running, while Washington continues to fight over how best to give veterans the care they earned — but which the government has sometimes failed to deliver.  Approved in the wake of the wait-list scandal that saw hundreds of veterans die while stuck on secret wait lists, the choice program allows those caught in backlogs to seek care at from a private clinic or doctor and bill the costs back to the Veterans Affairs Department.

President Trump and Secretary Shulkin Announce VA Choice and Quality Employment Act.  President Donald Trump has signed an emergency spending bill that will pump more than $2 billion into a program that allows veterans to receive private medical care at government expense.

Longtime director of DC VA medical center fired from VA headquarters:  Report.  The Department of Veterans Affairs fired the former director of the Washington D.C. VA Medical Center, who was reassigned to VA headquarters in April, according to a report Tuesday [8/1/2017].  In a statement Tuesday [8/1/2017], the agency said Brian Hawkins "failed to provide effective leadership at the medical center," NBC4 in Washington first reported.  D.C.'s VA Medical Center had reassigned Hawkins in April to the new position at the VA headquarters after an internal inspection of the Washington D.C. VA Medical Center found shortages of medical supplies and unsanitary conditions.  Congressional leaders and military veterans criticized Hawkins' reassignment to a significant position.  In June, NBC4 reported the D.C. VA Medical Center experienced a cockroach infestation in 2015.

Lawmakers halt bill to let VA doctors prescribe pot for pain.  Republican lawmakers have blocked a vote on a bill that would have allowed Veterans Affairs doctors to recommend medical marijuana as a pain treatment in states where the drug is legal.  The House Rules Committee stopped a proposed "Veterans Equal Access" amendment from moving to debate on the House floor by keeping the measure out of the House's proposed VA funding bill for next year.

Finally Accountability at the VA.  The Department of Veterans Affairs has fired 526 employees, demoted another 27 employees and temporarily suspended an additional 194 for longer than two weeks, since President Donald J. Trump took office on January 20.  That information is contained in the Adverse Actions accountability report posted on the agency's website.  The report doesn't include the employees' names, but shows their positions.  CBS reports that in an effort for more transparency and accountability within the VA, Secretary of Veterans Affairs David J. Shulkin announced that the list "accountability actions" will be posted and updated online weekly.

Trump administration has fired more than 500 VA employees since January.  Department of Veterans Affairs officials have fired more than 500 misbehaving employees since January, according to data posted online Friday [7/7/2017].  VA Secretary David Shulkin touted his agency's decision to publish its efforts to hold VA employees accountable, unveiling new requirements for updating the public on personnel actions.  "Veterans and taxpayers have a right to know what we're doing to hold our employees accountable and make our personnel actions transparent," Shulkin said in a statement.  "Posting this information online for all to see, and updating it weekly, will do just that."

Our veterans deserve a VA system that works.  It starts today.  Hardworking men and women from all across America get up every day, go to work, and deliver results.  If they don't, they lose their jobs — that's the basic definition of accountability in the workplace.  For far too long, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) employees haven't been living up to the same work standards of the average American.  Stories of excessive wait times and backlogs, poor quality of care, and misconduct have plagued the Department for years and are repeated in every state across the country — including my home state of Texas.  As the VA's culture falters, so does their service to our veterans.

House approves bill creating more accountability at VA after string of scandals.  The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation Tuesday [6/13/2017] giving the leadership of the Department of Veterans Affairs the ability to fire employees for misconduct and protect those who uncover wrongdoing at the agency.  The vote was 368-55.

Congress passes long-sought VA accountability bill.  Congress approved long-sought legislation Tuesday [6/13/2017] to make firing employees easier for the Department of Veterans Affairs, part of an effort urged by President Donald Trump to fix a struggling agency serving millions of veterans.

DOJ Decides Not To Prosecute VA Execs Accused Of Intentionally Misleading Congress.  The Department of Justice won't prosecute VA executives accused of intentionally misleading Congress about cost overruns at the new VA hospital in Denver.  The House Committee on Veterans Affairs asked the DOJ for a perjury investigation in 2016, as the committee believed executives were misleading lawmakers to cover up exploding costs for the facility under construction, but the DOJ maintains there is not enough evidence to move forward with prosecution, the Associated Press reports.

Senate OKs bill to make firing employees easier for VA.  The Senate approved broad legislation Tuesday [6/6/2017] to make firing employees easier for the beleaguered Department of Veterans Affairs, part of an accountability effort urged by President Donald Trump following years of high-profile problems.

Senate Introduces Bipartisan VA Accountability Bill Streamlining Firing Process.  A bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation Thursday [5/11/2017] that would grant the secretary of Veterans Affairs the authority to accelerate the firing of employees for misconduct, a deal that arrives two months after the House passed its own version along party lines.  The legislation extends the appeals period from the House bill for employees placed on administrative leave, but enables the department to withhold pay from those workers who are awaiting a case determination.  Similar to the House version, it includes a measure to strip employees of bonuses awarded in error and reduce pensions of workers convicted of a felony related to their job.

Maxine Waters was right, it's time to start talking impeachment — of VA officials.  On May 9, 2017 the Court of the Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a ruling about former disgraced Veterans Affairs Phoenix hospital administrator Sharon Helman.  Helman oversaw the Phoenix VA, when the scandal broke about fictitious waitlist times.  The waitlist times were used to assess bonuses handed out by the VA.  After a suspension and investigation, Helman was eventually fired for charges related to the appointment data, retaliation against whistleblowers, and conflicts-of-interest involving gifts from lobbyists.  Helman was later convicted and given probation in the conflict-of-interest case.  The court overturned a provision of the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act.  The intent of the bill was to give the Executive Branch more power to fire high level employees for cause.  If there was any government employee that deserved to be fired for cause, it was Helman.

OIG Report:  More Than 100 Veterans Died While Waiting for Care at Los Angeles VA.  More than 100 veterans died while waiting for care at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Los Angeles, Calif., over a nine-month span ending in August 2015, according to a new government report.  The VA Office of Inspector General found in a recent healthcare inspection that 225 veterans at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System facility died with open or pending consults between Oct. 1, 2015 and Aug. 9, 2015.  Nearly half — 117 — of those patients died while experiencing delays in receiving care.  The inspector general reported that 43 percent of the 371 consults scheduled for patients who ended up dying were not timely because of a failure by VA employees to follow proper procedure.  The report was unable to substantiate claims that patients died as a result of the delayed consults.

VA fires embattled Louisiana director amid scandal, secret wait lists.  The director of the beleaguered Shreveport VA hospital in Louisiana has been fired following a three-year tenure filled with scandal — including accusations of covering up a secret wait-list, creating severe staffing shortages and refusing to buy essentials like vital signs machines, linens or mattresses.  Toby Mathew, who became director of Overton Brooks VA Medical Center in June 2014, was fired on April 13 due to "charges related to general misconduct, and failure to follow policy and provide effective oversight of the Center's credentialing and privileging program," said an internal VA memo obtained by Fox News.  This is one of the highest-profile employee removals since Secretary Eric Shinseki left in May 2014 following news of the massive wait-list scandal at the Phoenix VA hospital.

Shulkin Mulls Closing 1,100 'Underutilized' VA Facilities.  Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin says his department is seeking to close perhaps more than 1,100 VA facilities nationwide as it develops plans to allow more veterans to receive medical care in the private sector. [...] In an internal agency document obtained by The Associated Press, the VA pointed to aging buildings it was reviewing for possible closure that would cost millions of dollars to replace.  It noted that about 57 percent of all VA facilities were more than 50 years old.  Of the 431 VA buildings it said were vacant, most were built 90 or more years ago, according to agency data.  The VA document did not specify the locations.

Veterans Affairs has 346 workers who do only union work.  An estimated 346 employees in the Department of Veterans Affairs do no actual work for taxpayers.  Instead, they spend all of their time doing work on behalf of their union while drawing a federal salary, a practice known as "official time."  That's according to a report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office.  But exactly what those VA workers are doing and why so many are doing it is not clear.  The VA doesn't track that, and the GAO report offers no clue.

VA Secretary:  New Office To Fire Bad Employees Will Cost A Bunch Of Money.  The upcoming employee accountability and whistleblower protection office at the Department of Veterans Affairs will cost a substantial amount, VA Secretary David Shulkin told reporters Wednesday [4/26/2017].  Shulkin explained in a call with reporters Wednesday evening that the executive order President Donald Trump will sign Thursday establishes an Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection with an executive in charge that reports directly to Shulkin.  The point of the office is to identify any barriers that might exist to removing bad employees from the VA.  And it won't come cheap.

VA just launched a website to track medical wait times.  The Department of Veterans Affairs on Wednesday [4/12/2017] launched a supplemental website meant to provide veterans with a tool to access quality of care data and patient wait time in real time.  "No other health-care system in the country releases this type of information on wait times.  This allows Veterans to see how VA is performing," VA Sec.  David Shulkin said in a statement.  The website, www.accesstocare.va.gov, will list data for the 1,700 national health facilities as well as a dozen private sector hospitals.  Currently, data for a little more than a dozen facilities' are available, though more than 700,000 people checked the website on the day of its grand opening.

Democrats Side With Union Bosses Over Veterans In VA Accountability Fight.  Democrats are constantly bleating about the need to better serve the nation's veterans.  Yet when it comes down to it, they would rather bow to their union masters than allow the VA to fire workers who aren't doing their jobs.  The proof is the Democrats' fervent opposition to a simple reform being pushed by Republicans — the VA Accountability First Act.  This bill would let the Veterans Affairs secretary fire someone and not have to wait a month for the person to actually be fired.  It would also let the VA cut the pensions for those convicted of a felony, and reclaim bonuses from those fired.

Washington Post Gives Obama 'Four Pinocchios' for False VA Claim.  The Washington Post fact checker team gave President Obama "Four Pinocchios" for claiming that his administration fired "a whole bunch of people" who were in charge of facilities at the Department of Veterans Affairs since the VA scandal began in 2014, determining that the statement was completely false.  Obama is not the only one accused of misleading the public about the number of people held accountable for manipulating patient wait-time data at the VA.  Department Secretary Robert McDonald has twice received Four Pinocchio ratings for making similar claims.

Report: Veterans in Crisis Still Left Hanging By Help Line.  Government investigators with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) "found that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) did not meet its call response-time goals for the Veterans Crisis Line (VCL)," according to the report that found issues with the center's text messaging line and live call centers.  The VA crisis centers are supposed to answer 90 percent of crisis calls within 30 seconds.  An investigation of covert calls to the centers found that this goal is still not being met, according to the report, which found that just 65 to 75 percent of calls were answered in the required time.  Text messages to the center were not responded to in 4 of 14 instances.

Tammy Baldwin Paid Clinton Lawyer $90K For Crisis Control After VA Scandal.  Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D., Wis.) paid Hillary Clinton's campaign lawyer $90,000 for crisis control following a Veteran Affairs facility scandal that engulfed the senator and her staff.  Baldwin, who was first elected to the Senate in 2012, was the only member of Congress from Wisconsin to receive an official federal government inspector general report warning of the over-prescription of narcotics given to veterans at the Tomah VA facility in her state.  The abuses at the facility ultimately led to the death of a Marine.  A memo was first circulated in 2009 warning of the dangerous amounts of narcotics prescribed to veterans at the Tomah VA facility by Dr. David Houlihan, the Tomah VA chief of staff.

Vets Suffer After VA Promotes Transgender Programs.  Under former President Barack Obama, veterans seeking health care though the Department of Veterans Affairs were often neglected or mistreated, but that didn't stop one VA medical center from bragging about its transgender initiative.  The Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center in Ohio was the subject of praise from the LGBT community in 2015 when it announced the opening of a clinic specializing in the care of transgender patients, such as giving them taxpayer-funded sex-change hormones, The Daily Caller reported.  However, when it came to the other 111,000 veterans in the hospital's care, the VA center failed miserably in providing adequate treatment, including not ensuring that its medical equipment was clean and its employees were properly trained.

House Stops VA from Finding Vets Mentally Unfit to Own a Gun.  The House passed on Thursday [3/16/2017] a bill to prohibit Veterans Affairs from blocking a veteran from buying a gun by labeling them mentally unfit, requiring a judiciary authority to make that determination.  The Veterans Second-Amendment Protection Act, introduced by Rep. Phil Roe (R-Tenn.), states "a person who is mentally incapacitated, deemed mentally incompetent, or experiencing an extended loss of consciousness shall not be considered adjudicated as a mental defective" by the VA "without the order or finding of a judge, magistrate, or other judicial authority of competent jurisdiction that such person is a danger to himself or herself or others."

Elderly Veteran Lays on Floor in Pain While Waiting at VA Hospital.  An elderly veteran lay on the floor in pain and resorted to using his bag of medication as a pillow while waiting at a Veterans Affairs medical center in Durham, North Carolina on Friday [2/24/2017].  Stephen McMenamin, a former U.S. Marine who was seeking care, and his wife posted photos of the scene on Facebook and said a nurse at the VA center yelled at the veteran for laying on the floor, Atlanta's WSB-TV reported Monday night.  "My wife found it upsetting, so she took a couple pictures," McMenamin told the news station, describing how he witnessed another veteran on the ground using his bag of medication for a pillow after being denied a reclining chair.

New VA Secretary Proposes Lifting Restrictions on Veterans Seeking Private Care.  On Sunday, Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin told the Disabled American Veterans conference in Arlington, Virginia that he was thinking about lifting restrictions on veterans who wish to receive private medical care.  The program that already allows certain veterans to receive non-VA care, the Choice Program, was originally instituted in 2014 after it was found that many VA facilities had long waiting times, even to the point that people awaiting care died in some cases.  As the law now stands, however, the program allows veterans to receive private care only if they live 40 miles from a VA facility or if they have waited more than 30 days for an appointment.  Shulkin proposed doing away with those requirements, as reported by Stars and Stripes.

Tammy Baldwin Quietly Left Committee With Oversight of Scandal-Plagued Wis.  VA Facility.  Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D., Wis.) has quietly stepped away from the committee that has oversight over a scandal-plagued Wisconsin Veterans Affairs facility, actions some Republicans see as the Democratic senator running from her past failures on the issue.  Baldwin served on the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee throughout the 114th Congress but does not appear to be on the committee in the 115th Congress, according to its roster.  The committee has oversight over the Tomah VA, a VA facility in Wisconsin that was over-prescribing opiates to patients and saw a Marine die from an overdose.  A memo, first circulated in 2009, warned of the dangerous amounts of narcotics that were being ordered by Dr. David Houlihan, the Tomah VA chief of staff, and prescribed to veterans at the Tomah VA center.

Senate unanimously confirms Trump-pick and Obama holdover David Shulkinas VA secretary.  The Senate unanimously confirmed physician David Shulkin to be secretary of Veterans Affairs on Monday night [2/13/2017].  He will now try to deliver on President Donald Trump's campaign promises to fix long-standing problems at the department.  Senators voted 100-0 to approve the lone holdover from the Obama administration.  He has been the VA's top health official since 2015.

Government Union Work Jumps Ahead In Line For Care At Veterans Affairs.  Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) employees are spending so much time performing job-protecting civil service union work that the quality of care provided to sick veterans suffers, according to a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.  The VA has no clue how many hours employees devote to "official time" — time spent working for unions during work hours on the taxpayer dime — because the VA has no standardized system for recording and calculating official time agency-wide, GAO found.  But one thing is clear — official time jeopardizes patient care.

Days Into Trump Admin, Corrupt Employees Are Already Being Fired At The VA.  Days into Donald Trump's administration, heads are finally beginning to roll at the Department of Veterans Affairs.  Two notoriously corrupt employees in Puerto Rico were fired this week, indicating that more may be on the way.  One is the hospital's CEO, DeWayne Hamlin, who offered an employee $305,000 to quit after she played a role in exposing his drug arrest.

Here's Why A Military Officer Might Be A Terrible Pick For The Next VA Secretary.  President-elect Donald Trump is considering a military flag officer to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), but a career military person would likely lack experience dealing with the civil service rules that have been the department's primary barrier to ending scandals.  Trump has said that he's taken longer to fill that department's top slot because its life-or-death challenges and long-running scandals make it so important.  But now there are only four Cabinet posts left to be chosen, and there is pressure to use the slot to shape a larger image of the administration.

Trump Under Increasing Pressure to Keep Obama VA Secretary.  Donald Trump is under increasing pressure from veterans organizations to retain Robert McDonald as the secretary of Veterans Affairs, though the president-elect's plan to reform the agency differs from efforts undertaken by McDonald during his tenure.  Twenty veterans organizations wrote to Trump urging him to keep McDonald in a letter sent Wednesday, citing his "proven track record" as VA secretary and leadership of an "enterprise-wide transformation" of the troubled federal agency.  They joined the leaders of the nation's largest veterans groups — the American Legion, Disabled American Veterans, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Vietnam Veterans of America, and AMVETS — who urged Trump's transition team to retain McDonald in a meeting last Friday.

Trump's Urgent Job:  Clean Up the VA.  In 2014, the nation was horrified to learn that vets were dying while waiting for medical appointments, and VA staff were concealing wait times.  Now new patients are waiting even longer.  Recently, a vet with heart troubles died while waiting for a cardiology appointment at the Washington, D.C. VA.  Investigators concluded he would likely have survived had he been seen.  Meanwhile Democratic senators are still blocking a bill to hold VA executives accountable for these deadly failures.  What's wrong with firing liars and incompetents?  Democrats would rather side with the public service unions that fill their campaign coffers and turn out the vote.

Report: VA staff left veteran's body in shower nine hours, tried to hide mistakes.  Staff members at the Bay Pines VA Healthcare System left the body of a veteran in a shower room for more than nine hours then tried to cover up the mistake, a hospital investigation shows.  A report of the investigation's findings provides no information about the veteran, who died in February at the hospice unit of the Bay Pines center, 10000 Bay Pines Blvd.

VA facility left dead veteran's body unattended in shower for 9 hours, report says.  First they moved the dead body into a hallway.  Then they took it into a shower room.  There it remained, ignored, for more than nine hours.  No one showed up to take it to the morgue because no one called the dispatchers.  Not much is known about the unidentified veteran who died in hospice care at the Bay Pines VA Healthcare System outside St.  Petersburg, Fla.  But a hospital investigation made public Friday [12/9/2016] by the Tampa Bay Times criticizes staff members for leaving the veteran's body unattended for such a long time and then trying to cover up their mistake.

Outage! Obama's VA desecrates lonely veteran's corpse.  The care of our nation's veterans under President Barack Obama has been appalling — and recent outrageous reports from Florida shows it's only getting worse.  A news report says that staff at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Florida discarded the corpse of a veteran in a shower and left it to fester throughout the day after the veteran had died alone and proper pickup procedures to the morgue weren't followed.

Assessing the Obama Legacy — Against His Own Mileposts.  [For example,] "Honoring our nation's veterans."  Obama's Department of Veteran Affairs was mired in scandal, and some of its nightmarish VA hospitals were awash in disease and unnecessary deaths.  Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki was forced to resign amid controversy.  Former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano apologized for issuing an offensive report falsely concluding that returning war vets were liable to join right-wing terrorist groups.

Oklahoma VA Hospital Staff Resigns After Maggots Found in Vet.  Whether it is a matter of understaffing, underfunding, or a combination of the two, a myriad of horrific tales have been made public during Obama's two terms as president.  The latest offense is sure to make your skin crawl.

Veterans Affairs leader must be more than political ally.  In just about every one of his campaign rallies, how many times did we hear Donald Trump pledge, "We've gotta take care of our veterans, folks."  Now the former host of "Celebrity Apprentice" and future host of the White House is floating the names of Sarah Palin and Scott Brown, two of the most attractive and vacuous cabinet suggestions ever, for the post of secretary of Veterans Affairs.  The news did not sit well with either Tom Lyons or Dan Magoon, two veterans who endured combat on opposite ends of the generational divide.

VA dentist accused of using improperly cleaned tools at Wisconsin facility resigns.  A dentist has resigned from his position at a Wisconsin Veterans Affairs hospital amid accusations he treated hundreds of patients with improperly cleaned equipment.

VA dentist resigns after possibly infecting 600 veterans with HIV and hepatitis.  An unidentified Department of Veterans Affairs dentist in Wisconsin resigned after possibly exposing hundreds of patients to HIV and hepatitis B and C.  Officials at Tomah Veterans Affairs Medical Center announced Friday the dentist, who placed veterans at risk by reusing his tools, resigned after initially moving to an administrative role, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

Wisconsin VA Hospital May Have Infected 600 Veterans With HIV Or Hepatitis.  A dentist at the Tomah Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Wisconsin exposed nearly 600 veterans to infectious diseases including HIV, Hepatitis B, and Hepatitis C, say VA administrators.  From October 2015 to October 2016, a dentist at the Tomah VA exposed 592 veterans to infectious diseases by reusing his own dental equipment and "cleaning" it instead of using the sterile and disposable equipment provided by the VA, said Acting Medical Center Director Victoria Brahm, according to WEAU News.

VA dentist may have infected veterans with HIV, hepatitis.  A dentist put nearly 600 veterans at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Tomah, Wisconsin at risk of blood-borne diseases such as HIV and hepatitis B and C after failing to follow standard sanitation procedures.  The VA is now offering free screenings.  The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced Tuesday that a dentist's failure to use sterilized equipment put close to 600 patients at its Tomah hospital at risk of diseases like HIV or hepatitis.  While there have been no reports of infections since it was reported on October 20, the VA has pledged to provide treatment to any veterans that are found to be infected.

Hollywood liberals think this is all a big joke.
Painfully Bad Taste:  ABC Developing Sitcom About VA Hospital.  Know what's really funny?  VA hospitals.  Real fertile territory for sitcom wackiness, what with the amputees and PTSD and the needless suffering of veterans at the hands of an incompetent and callous bureaucracy.  At least, ABC seems to think it a laugh riot.  The network has committed to produce a pilot of a sitcom called Lakeside VA.  The Hollywood Reporter calls the project "a comedy with heart."

Another government hospital runs over budget, repeating a wasteful pattern.  Construction of the new Army medical center at Fort Bliss in El Paso is almost two years behind schedule and could be more than $100 million over budget before it's completed.  Two years is an awfully long time for our nation's heroes to wait for new hospital beds.  And Donald Trump's tax returns notwithstanding, $100 million is still an awful lot of taxpayer cabbage.  One might argue that at least the William Beaumont Army Medical Center is no Aurora, Colorado, Veterans Affairs hospital, still unfinished, with the meter running on more than $1 billion in cost overruns and years past its estimated original completion date.  Still, the troubles at Fort Bliss should come as no surprise.  A check on the past two military hospital projects — in Killeen and San Antonio — shows the same budget bloat and dilatory scheduling.

Air Force Veteran Forced To Wait 5 Months For A Simple Wheelchair.  Air Force veteran Arthur DeAngelis's five-month wait for a simple wheelchair finally came to an end Friday.  DeAngelis, an 80-year-old vet, had to wait five months for a replacement wheelchair from the Hampton Veterans Affairs medical center, The Virginian-Pilot reports.  He waited ever since April 22, when he was fitted for a custom chair.  "I've been in it for 10 minutes now," DeAngelis said.  "So far, so good."  The wait was only supposed to take six to eight weeks, and despite numerous communication attempts with the VA, staff did not return any phone calls.

200 veterans die waiting for care as troubled Phoenix VA builds new backlog.  The Phoenix Veterans Affairs office is still improperly canceling veterans' appointments, has built up a new backlog of cases — and at least one veteran is likely dead because of it, the department's inspector general said in a new report Tuesday [10/4/2016].  Two years after they first sounded the alarm about secret waiting lists leaving veterans struggling for care at the Phoenix VA, investigators said some services have improved, and they cleared the clinic of allegations that top officials ordered staff to cancel appointments.

Housebound vets denied millions in benefits by VA.  The Department of Veterans Affairs has shortchanged thousands of disabled veterans who can't leave home without assistance roughly $110 million.  The VA's Office of Inspector General issued the finding after conducting a review of the VA's housebound benefits program, Stars & Stripes reports.  The IG found that payment errors affected the benefits of 33,400 veterans confined to their homes because of illness or injury, the paper reported.  The VA designated 186,000 veterans housebound as of March 2015.

Veterans With Cancer Died After Delays at VA Hospital.  Patients at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in New Mexico who were eventually diagnosed with cancer experienced delays in care that put their health at risk, according to the agency's inspector general.  Dozens of veterans who tested positive for colorectal cancer at the New Mexico VA Health Care System in Albuquerque were not notified of their results in a timely manner, according to the inspector general report released this week, which faulted a lack of oversight from the system's leadership.  Colorectal cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States.  Screening can detect the cancer in its early stages, making it easier to beat.

Lawmakers Consider Bill Expanding VA Firing Powers.  House lawmakers this week will consider the latest legislative effort to allow the Department of Veterans Affairs to more easily hold employees accountable for misconduct, amid warnings from the Obama administration that the new bill would "undermine" the agency's workforce.  Ahead of considering the VA Accountability First and Appeals Modernization Act of 2016 on the House floor, the administration expressed concerns over the legislation, labeling provisions that make it easier for the VA to fire or demote employees "misguided and burdensome." The administration also said in a statement that portions of the legislation raise "constitutional concerns," including a rule that would shorten the appeals process for employees who are disciplined by the agency.  The development sets up a fight between the White House and Congress over efforts to expand the VA's firing powers.  The Obama administration objected to congressional efforts last year to make it easier for the VA to punish any employee for misconduct or poor performance.

Obama rejects panel's proposal for more oversight of VA health care system.  President Obama objected Thursday [9/1/2016] to a new governing board to oversee health care at the Department of Veterans Affairs, saying it would undermine the VA secretary's authority and make it harder for the scandal-ridden agency "to implement transformative change."  The president said the recommendation by a national commission for a new "board of directors" for the nation's largest health care system also would "weaken the integration" of the VA's medical program with other services.  He also said the Justice Department has advised that the extra layer of oversight "would violate the appointments clause of the Constitution."

The Editor says...
Mr. Obama displays selective and sporadic concern for the Constitution.

A symbol of hatred or history?  Obama quietly bans Confederate flag at cemeteries.  The Veterans Affairs Department quietly moved this month to ban flying of Confederate flags from fixed flagpoles at the cemeteries it runs, striking yet another blow against the controversial emblem.  Congress had debated and rejected that change, but the Obama administration decided to move forward anyway, saying it was unilaterally imposing the restrictions.  "In particular, we will amend our policy to make clear that Confederal flags will not be displayed from any permanently fixed flagpole in a national cemetery at any time," wrote Ronald E. Walters, under secretary for memorial affairs at the VA.

Vet's suicide in VA hospital parking lot brings new scrutiny to agency.  The suicide of a 76-year-old former Navy man in the parking lot of a New York VA hospital where he was allegedly denied care has raised new questions about the federal agency, and his family and friends hope his death won't be in vain.  Peter A. Kaisen, 76, of Islip, shot and killed himself outside the Northport Veterans Affairs Medical Center, where he had been a patient.

Veteran Kills Himself in Parking Lot of V.A. Hospital on Long Island.  A 76-year-old veteran committed suicide on Sunday in the parking lot of the Northport Veterans Affairs Medical Center on Long Island, where he had been a patient, according to the Suffolk County Police Department.  Peter A. Kaisen, of Islip, was pronounced dead after he shot himself outside Building 92, the nursing home at the medical center.  The hospital is part of the Veterans Affairs medical system, the nation's largest integrated health care organization, which has been under scrutiny since 2014, when the department confirmed that numerous patients had died awaiting treatment at a V.A. hospital in Phoenix.  Officials there had tried to cover up long waiting times for 1,700 veterans seeking medical care.  A study released by the Government Accountability Office in April indicated that the system had yet to fix its scheduling problems.

VA has bed bug problem in major Illinois hospital.  The Department of Veterans Affairs is asking the private sector to help it monitor for bed bugs at a major VA hospital in Illinois.  The VA on Monday put out a bid on a small business to take up pest-monitoring duties for the VA's Illiana Health Care System in Danville, Ill.  That hospital offers a full range of services to veterans, including surgery, outpatient care and mental health services.  But that hospital may once again be overrun with bed bugs, a problem the same hospital has had before.  A report from 2014 said the hospital had been hit twice with bed bugs.

Obama Shamelessly Downplays Ongoing Problems At The VA.  President Obama, in an amazing display of self-adulation, gave a lengthy speech to the Disabled American Veterans in Atlanta, Ga., this week, in which he boasted about all the progress he's made in delivering better health care to veterans. [...] Two years ago, Obama solemnly swore that he was "moving ahead with urgent reforms, including stronger management and leadership and oversight, and we're instituting a critical culture of accountability."  He's not delivered on any of those promises.

Cleveland, cockroaches and the Clintons.  [Scroll down]  One of the more tangible scandals this cycle is the ongoing mess at the Department of Veterans Affairs.  This agency is tasked with one duty:  Take care of the people who fought and were injured in the defense of our freedom.  Long waiting lists that led to premature, inexcusable deaths and suicides made this a sensational (if not horrific) saga when the story initially broke.  Lately, we learn of millions of dollars in expensive artwork at VA facilities and an explosion of non-physician hiring.

Trump Gets It Right On Reforming the VA.  [Donald] Trump is absolutely right in his diagnosis of what ails the program:  "Politicians in Washington have tried to fix the VA by holding hearings and blindly throwing money at the problem.  None of it has worked."  It is a classic example of a single-payer health care system — wasteful, inefficient and impervious to change.  A case in point is the $10 billion "reform" passed two years ago that was supposed to relieve chronic, and at times deadly, delays that veterans had to endure to get treatment.  An Associated Press investigation found that wait times had not improved at all last year.

Report: Billions in New Spending Failed to Fix VA Problems, Made Some Worse.  Amid public outrage over the deadly wait list manipulation scandal that consumed the federal Department of Veterans Affairs in 2014, politicians on both sides of the aisle demanded accountability and reforms.  As usual, many Democrats blamed the agency's systemic corruption on funding shortfalls, which was an inaccurate red herring.  Nevertheless, Congress allocated billions in additional dollars for the VA two years ago.  A year later, wait times for care had gotten worse.  CNN, which originally broke the VA corruption story, has summarized the findings of a panel tasked with evaluating the VA's progress — and the picture they paint isn't pretty.

VA Releases Results of Largest Analysis of Veteran Suicide Rates.  The Department of Veterans Affairs released sobering new statistics today about veteran suicide rates in the United States.  According to the VA, an average of 20 veterans died from suicide every day in 2014.  The VA examined over 55 million veteran records from 1979 to 2014 from every state in the nation.  The last time the VA conducted a study like this was in 2010, but that report included data from only 20 states.

Shocker: Government Throws Billions at Problem — Doesn't Solve it.  The latest example of government making worse the problem they created is the V.A. healthcare system.  Feel free to also call it a vision of the future of Obamacare.  And why is it that America's heroes are always the ones getting the shaft?  We never seem to hear about the sorry state of the welfare system, or any of the other hundreds of government giveaway programs.  They seem to get their checks and benefits on time.  It's always our veterans, the men and women who put it all on the line for our country, who get the government short-shrift.  Reports have been consistently bad on the state of the V.A. system for years — decades even, yet it can't seem to get fixed.  We've all heard horror stories, one after another, of veterans receiving care ranging from inadequate to downright appalling.  And that's assuming they receive care at all.  Many have died waiting to receive it.  Two years ago the brainiacs in Congress decided enough was enough.  It was time to "fix the chronic delay problem at the Veterans Health Administration."  So they did what governments always do — throw gobs of money at it.  That will fix it right up.  They threw down $10 billion to develop the "Veterans Choice" program.

Bad VA care may have killed over 1,000 veterans, dying veteran speaks.  Much has been in the news about the Veterans Administration's (VA) neglect in healthcare and other Veterans Administration scandals with our nation's veterans and based on a new report, substandard VA care may have killed more than 1,000 veterans.  Robert Alvarez of the Uniformed Services Justice & Advocacy Group (USJAG) reported that when the national slate of scandals first broke at the Phoenix VA Medical Center in 2014 many veterans, family members and advocates came out of the gate loaded for bear and many policy-makers swore that they would usher in much-needed reforms, or else.  However, as Alvarez stated, not much has changed, the scandals have continued, and the debacle that is the Veteran's Administration is seemingly all about many things, but not systemic accountability.

Senate report slams VA watchdog for 'systemic' failures in probe of Wisconsin hospital.  A Senate committee's report into overprescription of powerful painkilling drugs at a Wisconsin VA hospital slammed the agency's inspector general's office for discounting key evidence, narrowing its inquiry and failing to make its report on the matter public.  The report by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released Tuesday [5/31/2016] and first obtained by USA Today, says the VA watchdog's investigation into the Tomah (Wis.) VA Medical Center was "perhaps the greatest failure to identify and prevent the tragedies at the Tomah VAMC."

Senate report slams VA watchdog for 'systemic' failures in probe of Wisconsin hospital.  A Senate committee's report into overprescription of powerful painkilling drugs at a Wisconsin VA hospital slammed the agency's inspector general's office for discounting key evidence, narrowing its inquiry and failing to make its report on the matter public.  The report by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which will be released Tuesday [5/31/2016] and was first obtained by USA Today, says the VA watchdog's investigation into the Tomah (Wis.) VA Medical Center was "perhaps the greatest failure to identify and prevent the tragedies at the Tomah VAMC."

$10 Billion Later, The VA Makes Veterans Wait Even Longer To Get Care.  When Congress rushed in two years ago to fix a chronic delay problem at the Veterans Health Administration, one of the key reforms was a new, $10 billion program called Veterans Choice.  The goal was to give vets an option of going to a private doctor if they weren't able to get a timely appointment with a government-paid VHA doctor. [...] That sounded good.  But in practice, the program has failed miserably.

Veterans Still Waiting For Those 'Urgent' VA Reforms Obama Promised Two Years Ago.  In the summer of 2014, President Obama promised swift changes to resolve chronic delays and cover-ups at the Veterans Health Administration.  Today, veterans are still waiting months to see doctors and the VHA is still doctoring wait times, an audit finds.

Union Officials Admit They Let Veterans Die Rather Than Talk To Republicans.  A federal employee union president is wracked with regret because veterans likely died at a time when she knew about gross misconduct within her Department of Veterans Affairs facility but didn't tell congressional leaders because they were Republicans.  "If I would've gone to him two years ago, who knows what kind of lives could've been saved," Germaine Clarno told a radio interviewer Monday, referring to the Republican leader of a VA subcommittee. Clarno, a lifelong Democrat and social worker at the Hines Veterans Affairs Hospital in Hines, Ill., has been president of the union representing doctors at the hospital since before the deadly wait-time scandal unfolded.

Suburban veteran fell through VA cracks four times before suicide.  A staple of the American military is to "leave no man behind" on a foreign battlefield.  Army veteran Tom Young was left behind by the VA, according to his family.  They say Young asked the Veterans Administration for help on four occasions, but only received phone calls back after he was dead.

New VA hotline chief has a history of dropped calls from veterans.  A former Air Force officer chosen to fix the VA's problem-plagued suicide hotline has been running other agency phone banks that have a poor record of service, dropping as many as one in five calls from veterans, according to internal data provided to USA TODAY.  The deputy secretary for the Department of Veterans Affairs, Sloan Gibson, defended the choice of Matthew Eitutus overseeing the crisis hotline, telling USA TODAY Friday that Eitutus has shown considerable initiative for one of the agency's biggest challenges — just answering the phone.

List Of Suicides At Phoenix VA Shows Exactly How These Veterans Were Let Down.  A group known as the Concerned Employees of the Phoenix VA has issued a letter Sunday [2/28/2016] containing a list of veteran suicides at the hospital, as well as the specific lapses in care which led to veteran despondency.  After giving several examples of abysmal failure at the Phoenix VA, the group decided to lay it all out on the table in a single bold pronouncement, according to the letter, obtained Tuesday by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Special Counsel Says VA Sought to Attack, Discredit Whistleblowers.  Oversight officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs failed to properly investigate medical misconduct allegations at multiple VA hospitals and issued reports that attempted to discredit and attack whistleblowers, according to a review by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.  In 2014, the Office of Special Counsel asked the VA inspector general's office to look into claims of "secret waiting lists" at two veterans hospitals after receiving whistleblower complaints.  Employees at the facilities claimed veterans would often be forced to wait months or longer for appointments, but this information was kept outside of the VA's official electronic records system so that administrators could dodge federal requirements and take home cash bonuses.

VA watchdog sits on wait-time investigation reports for months.  After the Veterans Affairs wait-time scandal erupted nearly two years ago, the department's chief watchdog investigated 73 VA facilities across the country and found scheduling problems in 51 cases.  But that watchdog — the VA's inspector general — still has not released reports with the findings of those investigations to Congress or the public.  As a result, it's impossible to tell which medical centers had problems, how serious those problems were, or whether they led to the deaths of any veterans.  The inspector general has said only that they range from simple rule violations to deliberate fraud.

Veteran's Futile Call to VA Prompts Congress Members to Act.  The video shows Army veteran Dennis Magnasco trying to schedule a doctor's appointment at his local VA hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts.  But a nearly five-minute phone call became a maddening stream of automated audio messages.  And just when it sounds like Magnasco will be transferred to a representative to help him schedule an appointment, he is looped back to the beginning of the original recording, again and again.  The problem of trying to get in the door of VA hospitals is one Magnasco said he's heard from veterans many times.

Whistleblowers cite disorder at VA hospital.  Nearly three dozen whistleblowers have come forward saying the VA Medical Center in Cincinnati is in a state of disorder.  They say veterans are not getting the care they need in the backyard of Secretary of Veterans Affairs Bob McDonald, the former chief executive of Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble Co.  Since October, a team of Scripps reporters has been talking to a group of 34 current and former medical center staff members.  The group, including 18 doctors from several departments, sent an unsigned letter to McDonald in September describing "urgent concerns about quality of care" at the facility, which serves more than 40,000 area veterans.  They allege a pattern of cost cutting that forced out experienced surgeons, reduced access to care and put patients in harm's way.

VA launches probe into allegations of misconduct at Cincinnati VA.  The Department of Veterans Affairs has launched a formal probe into allegations of "misconduct that adversely affects the care of the veterans at the Cincinnati" VA, Fox News learned late Friday [2/12/2016].  The VA began a series of what were described to Fox News as "cryptic" phone calls to Congressional offices, advising them of a form inquiry by the VA Inspector General. [...] Dr. David Shuklin, the VA's Under Secretary for Health, has asked the Inspector General to probe the still-vague matter.

Let veterans bypass federal crooks and see a doctor.  In April 2014, CNN first reported that VA employees secretly and systematically gamed their internal computer system to hide a massive backlog of medical care to ailing veterans.  While doing this, the officials paid themselves and their subordinates bonuses based on their fraudulently excellent performance.  It has been discovered that this practice of cooking the books at the expense of veterans was widespread, not at just a handful of VA facilities but at more than 100 of them. How many people have been fired for this?  You might well ask.  The answer is — three.

Sanders initially cast VA scandal as partisan effort to undermine agency.  Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), now a Democratic presidential candidate, was slow to take seriously reports in 2014 of the use of fake wait lists by Department of Veterans Affairs employees.  As the New York Times reported, Sanders, then chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, initially indicated that the controversy was being fueled by a partisan effort to undermine the government agency.

Vets Still Waiting For Real Reform.  Don't be fooled by last week's headlines about more money and greater accountability at the VA.  It's the usual malarkey coming out of Washington DC.  The prognosis for vets who need healthcare remains poor, with vets likely to get the run around and face delays again in 2016.  On Friday, congress passed an omnibus spending bill for the coming year that allocates a whopping $171 billion to the Veterans Administration, which is even more than the department requested.  But that's pouring money down a rat hole, as long as the VA is riddled with corruption and saddled with job protection rules that favor employees, not vets.  As for the latest highly touted whistle blower protection law signed by President Obama last Friday, there were whistle blower protections already on the books.  What's lacking is the will to enforce them.  Adding more pages to the U.S. Code won't change that.

Vet says he waited on VA hospital floor for hours.  An Army veteran says he was forced to lie on the floor of the emergency room for nearly four hours waiting to get care at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Albuquerque.  Adam Griego says he was in agonizing pain while on the floor.  His mother took a photo of the incident, which occurred last week.

Here Are The Documents Showing Massive Whistleblower Retaliation At Phoenix VA.  Two high-level officials at the Phoenix VA medical center have completely escaped punishment for allegedly retaliating against whistleblowers who brought to light serious patient care problems.  Despite trying to keep the names of the retaliating officials quiet, the Department of Veterans Affairs now has a public relations nightmare on its hands, as the reports have emerged.  The internal investigations wrapped up 15 months ago.

Deadly DC: The Land of No Consequences.  This week, the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs will hold the 999,999th oversight hearing (give or take a few) on the VA's homicidal, no-fault culture.  "In the wake of the biggest scandal in VA history, in which 110 VA medical facilities maintained secret lists to hide long waits for care," the panel notes, "the department has successfully fired just three low-level employees for manipulating wait times.  Not a single VA senior executive has been successfully fired for doing the same."

VA can't afford drug for veterans suffering from hepatitis C.  On Tuesday [12/1/2015], a Senate report found Gilead Sciences, which makes a cure for a fatal form of hepatitis, is more interested in profits than patients.  The cure was invented under the leadership of a celebrated doctor in the Department of Veterans Affairs, but at $1,000 a pill, even the VA can't afford to save the lives of veterans who need it.  In 2013, Vietnam veteran Zion Yisrael was told he had five years to live.  He has stage 4 liver disease, caused by hepatitis C — which has infected as many as 230,000 veterans.  Most veterans contracted it in Vietnam where it was spread by battlefield blood transfusions and vaccinations.

The VA System Was Always Corrupt.  Conservatives have been saying, no shouting, that if you want to see the future of Obamacare, of the top down government run healthcare of our future, we need look no further than the VA system. [...] Others say no, that you can't throw the baby out with the bath water.  That sure, there are some bad hospitals, some bad administrators, but it's not all bad — that it wasn't always this way.  Well, to that I say bunk!  Unlike other government organizations, the VA system didn't get as bad as it is over time.  It's been bad and it's been corrupt from its conception — when it began as the Veterans Bureau in 1921.

St. Paul VA official received an $8,697 bonus in year she was under investigation.  Kimberly Graves, the top St. Paul Department of Veterans Affairs official who recently refused to answer questions in front of a congressional panel, received an $8,697 bonus in 2014 — the same year she was under federal investigation for allegedly abusing her authority for personal gain.  Graves' bonus came after she received almost $130,000 in moving expenses to relocate from the East Coast to St. Paul last year — a move she orchestrated, according to a VA inspector general's report.  The report found that Graves also retained her $173,949 annual salary even though her job responsibilities were significantly diminished in the move to Minnesota.

The VA Is Still Paying Millions In Performance Bonuses.  The scandal-plagued Veterans Affairs Department is still paying performance bonuses to executives and employees to the tune of $142.5 million last year.

Veterans Affairs pays $142 million in bonuses amid scandals.  The Department of Veterans Affairs doled out more than $142 million in bonuses to executives and employees for performance in 2014 even as scandals over veterans' health care and other issues racked the agency.  Among the recipients were claims processors in a Philadelphia benefits office that investigators dubbed the worst in the country last year.  They received $300 to $900 each.  Managers in Tomah, Wis., got $1,000 to $4,000, even though they oversaw the over-prescription of opiates to veterans — one of whom died.

Four Pinocchios!
VA secretary misstates the number of wait-time manipulation disciplinary actions — again.  This is the second time this year that we found [VA Secretary Robert] McDonald inaccurately citing the disciplinary actions taken against VA employees for manipulating wait-time data.  There is a disturbing discrepancy between the figure McDonald cited during the speech and the figure his agency is reporting to Congress as cases directly related to patient wait-time manipulation.  As of the day before his speech, there were 305 employees and eight senior executives who had proposed or completed disciplinary actions against them for any basis relating to patient scheduling, failure of oversight, record manipulation, appointment delays and/or patient deaths.  Among them, 27 were cases relating specifically to "patient wait time manipulation."

Hillary: Not To Worry, the VA Scandal Is Not A "Widespread" Problem — Only 40 Vets Died.  Hillary is at it again.  She said on Rachel Maddow's show on Friday [10/23/2015], that the problems at the Department of Veterans Affairs are real, but not nearly as widespread as the coverage would indicate.  She blamed Republicans for using the issue as part of an "ideological agenda" and said "they want the VA to fail."

Anger at VA grows after employees plead the Fifth.  Lawmakers are renewing calls to hold Department of Veterans Affairs officials accountable for misconduct after two VA employees refused to answer questions during a congressional hearing Monday evening [11/2/2015].  Kimberly Graves and Diane Rubens had both received subpoenas to appear before the House Veterans Affairs Committee Monday [11/2/2015], where they both invoked their Fifth Amendment rights when questioned about alleged abuse of a VA program that compensates employees for transferring locations.  Both Rubens and Graves could still be called back before the committee.

Two Senior VA Officials Plead The Fifth Amendment At Hearing.  Two senior officials from the Department of Veterans Affairs have pleaded the Fifth Amendment in front of a House Veterans' Affairs Committee hearing on relocation bonus corruption.  Philadelphia and Wilmington VA regional offices director Diana Rubens and St. Paul VA regional office director Kimberly Graves pleaded the Fifth and refused to answer any of the numerous questions put forward by HVAC chairman GOP Rep. Jeff Miller.

A Good Start.  After poor management at the Veterans Administration was implicated in numerous deaths, the New York Times reported in April that "at most three" VA employees lost their jobs.  A September inspector general's report revealed that VA employees were getting around having their bonuses frozen as a result of the scandal by creating new positions at the agency, then volunteering to relocate for these jobs — and collecting exorbitant expenses related to the move.  One VA executive relocating to Philadelphia collected $274,019.

Two Pinocchios:
Hillary Clinton's misleading claim that 'numerous surveys' show veterans are satisfied with VA medical care.  Post-care satisfaction surveys do not necessarily reflect the population of veterans at the center of the VA scandal, which dealt particularly with patients' access to care.  A large portion of veterans who received medical care may have had positive experiences, but this overlooks the hundreds of thousands of patients who experienced delays in care, or the dozens who died while waiting for care, as the inspector general found.  While she says numerous surveys show veterans' satisfaction, the examples her claim is based on are either funded by the VA or a non-scientific survey of veteran attitudes.

Vets still waiting months to see doctor, another died on wait list.  Remember how Hillary Clinton repeatedly assured voters over the past week that the real scandal at the Veterans Administration was that Republicans wanted to privatize some of its functions in order to allow veterans to actually see a doctor?  Even in Hillary's attempted walkback on Wednesday [10/28/2015], she still stressed that she was more concerned with GOP reform efforts than in solving the systemic fraud that kept thousands of veterans from getting medical care.

After Clinton Minimizes VA Troubles, Three Reports Expose Shortfalls Across Country.  Days after Hillary Clinton said that Republicans have inflated problems at the Department of Veterans' Affairs to make them appear more "widespread," three reports point to shortfalls and mismanagement at VA facilities across the country.  The VA Office of Inspector General released three separate reports on VA facilities in Alaska, Illinois, and California this week that found insufficiencies at the locations.  The first assessment, released Wednesday [10/28/2015], found that a veteran who could not eat because of difficulty swallowing experienced a delay in getting care at the Oxnard Community Based Outpatient Clinic at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System in California.  The patient later died.

Clinton gaffe brings VA problems into 2016 race.  Sen. John McCain said Wednesday [10/28/2015] that Hillary Clinton's recent comments about the Department of Veterans Affairs should make veterans question whether she can be president.  McCain, R-Ariz., took the offensive, along with Rep. Jeff Miller of Florida, on behalf of the Republican National Committee, which seized on the growing controversy over Clinton's statement last week claiming the VA's problems are "not widespread."  She told MSNBC that the GOP is exaggerating VA dysfunction in a plan to cut funding and privatize the agency.

Hillary's defense of VA: One too many rides on the VRWC pony.  At the very least, Republicans should not assume that the issue is settled.  And neither should the media that rushed to toss hosannas at Hillary last week.  Her bizarre and paranoid rant discounting the deaths of dozens of veterans at the hands of a corrupt VA as nothing more than a political attack on single-payer health care should also remind Democrats that Hillary remains the same haughty, entitled, and unlikable candidate that she turned out to be in 2008.

Sorry, Hillary Clinton. VA Corruption is Widespread.  Hillary Rodham Clinton says the furor over sick vets waiting for health-care is overblown and "not as widespread as it has been made out to be." [...] Sorry, Clinton.  That's wrong.  138 nonpartisan investigations prepared for Congress — count them, 138 — have shown corruption and dysfunction throughout the VA system.  And our ailing vets bear the brunt.

Hillary Clinton's Icy Indifference To Veterans' Suffering At The VA.  It almost defies belief that a leading presidential candidate could show such hardened indifference to the plight of America's veterans, some 57,000 of whom have been shunted off to Soviet-style waiting lists that have exceeded 90 days, and nearly a thousand of whom have died while in the Department of Veterans Affairs' subprime care.  Incredibly, that's what Clinton conveyed to lefty MSNBC interviewer Rachel Maddow, who actually tried to get Clinton to admit that the system was failing under President Obama's leadership.

Clinton: VA Problems Overblown. VA Whistleblower: Let Me Give You A Facility Tour Then.  Department of Veterans Affairs whistleblower Brandon Coleman is offering a personal tour at any VA facility to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to show her that corruption and mismanagement at the department is neither a right-wing conspiracy, nor restricted to one part of the country.  Coleman appeared Monday [10/26/2015] on Fox News to offer a response to Clinton's claims that the apparent crisis at the VA is a product of press coverage and Republicans pushing an ideological agenda.

Clinton: Veterans Affairs scandal not a 'widespread' problem.  Democratic primary front-runner Hillary Clinton says the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) scandal is not as "widespread" of a problem as coverage would indicate. [...] The former first lady blamed Republicans for using the issue as part of an "ideological agenda" and said they want the VA to "fail."

Veterans still facing major medical delays at VA hospitals.  Despite billions of extra dollars poured into the agency in the last year and numerous reforms intended to improve veterans' access to care, whistleblowers and internal documents obtained by CNN reveal some VA facilities continue to grapple with appointment wait times of months or more.  Even at the Phoenix VA medical center, where CNN learned last year "secret" appointment lists were hiding how veterans were dying waiting for care, sources say complicated wait-time calculations obscure ongoing appointment delays.

It's Time to Get Rid of the VA.  There is only one guaranteed way to get fired from the Department of Veterans' Affairs.  Falsifying records won't do it.  Prescribing obsolete drugs won't do it.  Cutting all manner of corners on health and safety is, at worst, going to get you a reprimand.  No, the only sure-fire way to get canned at the VA is to report any of these matters to authorities who might do something about it.  That, at least, is what the U.S. Office of Special Counsel recently reported to the president of the United States.  The Special Counsel's office is the agency to which government whistleblowers go to report wrongdoing.

VA In Midst of 'Leadership Crisis'.  The report focuses on the leadership challenges at VA facilities bred in an environment in which employees lack trust and feel reluctant to speak up about problems.  "VHA leaders operate within a challenging and disempowering environment that discourages emerging leaders from seeking promotion within the organization," the report explains.  "A misalignment of accountability and authority exists within a broader VHA culture characterized by risk aversion and lack of trust."  Visits to VA facilities revealed that employees consistently hold back on reporting potential problems.  "At almost every facility visited, at least one leader interviewed mentioned that risk aversion and a reluctance to 'speak up' were a significant issue," the researchers write.  Leadership at VA hospitals is also characterized by unclear roles and responsibilities among staff.

Status Quo Still Reigns Over at the VA.  It's been over a year since the Veterans' Affairs healthcare scandal broke, and despite promises of change from the Obama administration, it looks like the old status quo still reigns at the department.  The government's Office of Special Counsel, a watchdog group in the government looking into the matter, has discovered that the VA has failed to properly discipline employees who played a role in the scandal.

Failure of Reform at VA Beckons Donald Trump With a Promise of Firings.  Robert McDonald, head of the Veterans Administration, claims he's making "great progress" delivering health care to vets and turning around the agency's mismanagement and corruption.  Don't believe him.  Right now, more than 35,000 combat vets who are automatically eligible for VA care are stuck on hold because the VA's enrollment process is broken beyond belief.

VA Inspector General: 307K veterans died waiting for health care.  The Inspector General's report is out on the failure of the Veterans Affairs Department and it is not pretty.  The report says 307K veterans with pending health care requests died while waiting for care.  That's 35% of all health care requests as of September 2014.

Confirmed: One-third of the vets on VA's waiting list are dead.  In July, reports surfaced that an estimated 239,000 veterans died before they became eligible for benefits, or 28 percent of the nearly 850,000 veterans thought to be seeking these benefits.  The OIG's report said the situation is even worse — it said 307,000 names on the VA's list of pending enrollees were deceased.  That's 35 percent of the 867,000 people on the list as of last year.

Videos allegedly show Memphis VA leaving disabled vets unattended.  Video footage allegedly showing veterans — many of whom are quadriplegics or paraplegics — being left unattended at a Memphis Veterans Affairs hospital during staff meetings is reviving concerns about how VA hospitals treat American servicemembers.  The videos, first reported by Communities Digital News (CDN) and said to be filmed at the Memphis VA Medical Center, show patients being left alone for about 30-45 minutes each evening during a staff meeting attended by all hospital staff, whistleblower and former Memphis VA employee Sean Higgins told FoxNews.com.

Will Making It Easier to Fire Feds Go Viral?  "Today, it's the VA.  Tomorrow, it could be your agency," said MSPB Chairman Susan Tsui Grundmann in a speech at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's EXCEL conference in Washington.  Grundmann was referring to a 2014 law that allows the VA secretary to fire any Senior Executive Service employee immediately, and a bill passed by the House in July that would make it easier to fire all VA employees — not just top career officials.  The intent of the 2014 Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act — which includes the provisions affecting senior executives — and the 2015 VA Accountability Act is to help the department more quickly get rid of poor performers or those engaged in wrongdoing.  The congressional efforts to expedite firing were launched after reports erupted last year about employees engaged in data manipulation and the excessive wait times for vets seeking appointments in Phoenix and elsewhere.

Veterans learn VA hospital dumped patient records with Social Security, personal info.  A Veterans Affairs hospital in South Dakota has waited more than two months to notify 1,100 patients that files containing their Social Security numbers and other personal information were dumped in a trash bin.  The Rapid City Journal reports that the data breach at the VA Hot Springs hospital took place in May, but it wasn't until July 29 that anyone was notified.  The paper said the breach was the most recent in a string of embarrassments that has engulfed the nation's VA system over charges of doctored wait lists, poor care and wasteful spending.

VA Threatens To Shut Down Hospitals As Vets Die Waiting For Benefits.  A little less than a year ago, President Obama signed a bill that injected an additional $16 billion in the Department of Veterans Affairs.  The measure was supposed to, as Obama put it, "ensure that veterans have access to the care that they've earned."  The money, he said, "will help the VA hire more doctors and more nurses and staff more clinics."  Obama said the bill also would improve accountability.  Whatever the bill's intentions, it hasn't succeeded.

One-Third of Veterans Awaiting VA Healthcare Already Dead, Report Says.  According to a leaked internal document from the Department of Veterans Affairs, nearly one-third of veterans awaiting healthcare coverage at the VA have already died.  The April 2015 report, leaked to the Huffington Post by VA whistleblower Scott Davis, indicates that 238,657 of the 847,882 veterans waiting to be enrolled in VA healthcare are already dead, suggesting that over 28 percent of veterans applying for health coverage perished while waiting for it.

V.A. Scandal Linked to Obama.  Driven out by whistleblowers, Acting Inspector General of the Veterans Administration Richard Griffin finally resigned last week.  Good riddance.  Griffin had whitewashed and concealed information about inadequate care and phony waiting lists and tried to retaliate against truth-tellers.  But don't expect real improvement at the VA.  Griffin's successor is another bureaucratic lifer, Lin Halliday.  She's been collecting a paycheck from the VA Inspector General's office since 1992, while the deadly problems festered.  President Obama seems to like that approach.

Wait Lists Grow as Many More Veterans Seek Care and Funding Falls Far Short.  One year after outrage about long waiting lists for health care shook the Department of Veterans Affairs, the agency is facing a new crisis:  The number of veterans on waiting lists of one month or more is now 50 percent higher than it was during the height of last year's problems, department officials say.  The department is also facing a nearly $3 billion budget shortfall, which could affect care for many veterans.  The agency is considering furloughs, hiring freezes and other significant moves to reduce the gap.  A proposal to address a shortage of funds for one drug — a new, more effective but more costly hepatitis C treatment — by possibly rationing new treatments among veterans and excluding certain patients who have advanced terminal diseases or suffer from a "persistent vegetative state or advanced dementia" is stirring bitter debate inside the department.

The mysterious case of $54 million VA spent on prosthetics in $24,999 payments.  Employees in the purchasing department of a VA hospital in the Bronx had used government purchase cards like credit cards at least 2,000 times to buy prosthetic legs and arms for veterans.  Each time they swiped the cards, it was for $24,999.  That was precisely one dollar below VA's charging limit for purchase cards.  When word reached Congress about the $54,435,743 worth of prosthetics bought under such odd circumstances over two years — the subject of an inspector general investigation announced Monday — lawmakers demanded details.  But they were told there was no documentation.

One magical Bronx VA hospital made $54M disappear.  When Robert McDonald took over as the head of Veterans Affairs last year, I seem to recall a fair deal of confidence being expressed that the scandal plagued embarrassment of a department was on the road to recovery.  And to be fair, some things have improved.  There has been more transparency and plenty of records being turned over to both Congress and the media.  But some of their major woes still remain.  As of April of this year, despite an extra $16 [billion] being funneled in, wait times for sick veterans have not significantly changed at some of the most troubled hospitals.

Phoenix VA Whistleblower Calls For Resignation Of Officials Amid ER Staffing Crisis.  Jared Kinnaman, a vocational rehabilitation counselor and whistleblower at the Phoenix Department of Veterans Affairs medical center, is calling for the resignation of Phoenix interim director Glen Grippen and Secretary Robert McDonald.  In two letters sent out Friday, Kinnaman recounted his struggle and efforts to promote accountability at the Phoenix VA, which so far have amounted to very little, despite promises of reform from the leadership.  Still, the long list of unacceptable practices continues unabated at the hospital.

The Obama Era of Unresolved Scandals and Outrages.  Remember the VA scandal?  Remember how outraged everyone was, and how adamant President Obama and the new VA secretary were to get to the bottom of it and hold everyone accountable?

More VA cover-ups.  It should be quite clear by now that the bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs needs a drastic purge.  Its perfidy became obvious about a year ago when Americans learned that various officials had been gaming the system in order to preserve their own performance bonuses and give the appearance that veterans were getting timely care.  The practice was widespread and many were complicit as veterans died and suffered in silence without the medical treatment they were promised.  Since then, a great many other problems in the agency have been revealed, including cover-ups of lethal infections at VA facilities, hospitals that consume resources and serve no patients, and pill mills.

Three Pinocchios:
Pelosi's perplexing claim that House bill would 'cut' VA medical care funds.  The House passed its first appropriations bill for fiscal year 2016, largely voting along party lines on the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs bill.  House Democrats, Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Bob McDonald and some veterans groups opposed the bill, saying it inadequately pays for veterans' medical needs and construction projects that could help expand their access to care.  The White House has threatened to veto the measure.  Prior to the House vote, Pelosi said the bill would "cut" $1.4 billion below the president's budget.  She said it "cuts" $690 million of it from veterans' medical care, the equivalent of 70,000 fewer veterans receiving medical care through VA in one year.  Are her statements accurate?

A Disturbing Update On Obama's 'Urgent' VA Reforms.  One year after the emotional media firestorm over long, fraudulent and even lethal wait lists for veterans seeking medical treatment at government facilities, virtually nothing has happened to change the situation for those who've served their country and now need health care.  Like a true Chicago pol, Barack Obama doesn't fire people, not when they know too much.  They "retire," which is what then VA Director Eric Shinseki chose to do.

Rick Perry: 'Outrageous' Lack of Accountability After Veterans Scandal.  Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, says it is "outrageous" that so few people have been held accountable at the Department of Veterans Affairs after the Obama administration promised action would be taken against those found responsible for manipulating wait times at VA hospitals.  Internal documents obtained by the New York Times show that despite claims by the department that at least 14 people had been fired, only three actually have lost their jobs.

Few People Lost Jobs With V.A. in Scandal.  The nationwide scandal last spring over manipulated wait times at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals led to the ouster of the secretary of veterans affairs and vows from the new leadership that people would be held accountable.  Then in February, the new secretary, Robert A. McDonald, asserted in a nationally televised interview that the department had fired 60 people involved in manipulating wait times to make it appear that veterans were receiving care faster than they were.  In fact, the department quickly clarified after that interview, only 14 people had been removed from their jobs, while about 60 others had received lesser punishments.  Now, new internal documents show that the real number of people removed from their jobs is much smaller still:  at most, three.

Why don't we just abolish the VA?  The men and women who serve in the military protect both the United States' security and its values, including political liberty, free enterprise and individual choice.  How strange, then, that when their time in uniform ends, we thank them for their service and turn them over to the Department of Veterans Affairs, which epitomizes centralized bureaucracy.

The 41st Vet Killed by the VA and the Obama Administration.  [Isaac] Sims died on Sunday, the day before Memorial Day. The week before, Sen. Bernie Sanders blocked a bill that could have enabled the corrupt and the stupid at the VA to be fired.  And we all know that Shinseki didn't resign soon enough.  We're not saying that firing everyone last week would have saved Sims, but it might have given him enough hope to hold out a few more days.

VA memo ordered false health care claims to cover up backlog.  Another veterans scandal hit the Obama administration Wednesday with the emergence of an internal Veterans Affairs memo that allowed bureaucrats to cook their books and assert they were answering diligently President Obama's call to reduce the backlog of veterans' benefits claims.  The memo was known inside the VA as "Fast Letter 13-10," and a government watchdog said Wednesday [4/15/2015] this "flawed" guidance from VA headquarters in Washington deliberately resulted in making the agency appear it was delivering services and benefits to veterans faster than it really was.

VA Scandal: 'Medical records of whistleblowers have been accessed and ... used to attempt to discredit the whistleblowers'.  If you really need further evidence of why it's dangerous to let government officials demand sensitive information from us, look no further than the ongoing scandal at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.  Once focused on the apparently lethal mistreatment of military veterans by a system created to provide them with (usually crappy) medical care, the story now also encompasses retaliation by officials against VA employees who raise concerns about such mistreatment.  Perhaps most disturbing:  "In several cases, the medical records of whistleblowers have been accessed and information in those records has apparently been used to attempt to discredit the whistleblowers," commented Carolyn Lerner from the Office of Special Counsel at a congressional hearing yesterday [4/13/2015].

Obama Fails Vets: VA Wait Lists As Bad As Ever.  A year ago, the VA scandal involving extreme wait times and cover-ups broke.  President Obama pledged urgent reforms, and Congress gave him billions to fund them. But so far, nothing's changed.

One year later, VA still protecting and promoting cover-up artists.  The new VA Secretary, Robert McDonald, has begun a period of self-searching and investigation within the department.  Unfortunately, he seems to be choosing his investigators from the very same corrupt and self-protecting pool of bureaucrats that have caused the VA's many problems.  Case in point:  One current investigation pertains to a VA facility where veterans were doped up with opiates and given no treatment for their underlying conditions.  It is good to see this rock turned over, but among those McDonald has appointed to the investigating board is Deborah Amdur, director of the White River Junction Veterans Affairs hospital in Vermont.  Amdur was just recently caught in a lie answering questions about a terrible scandal at her own facility.

Worst VA Health Care Wait Times Are In The South.  The chronic delays plaguing the Veterans Affairs health system are concentrated in a fraction of its hospitals and clinics — many of them in the South — that have done far worse than others in delivering prompt care, according to government data reviewed by The Associated Press.

Wait times at Farmington veterans clinic among worst in U.S..  Veterans' wait times to see a doctor in Farmington are some of the longest in the nation.  A study looking into the number of veterans stuck on waiting lists to see doctors nationwide by The Associated Press revealed the Farmington VA clinic was the sixth worst in the country for wait times.

VA Reform: Another Obama "Success Story".  Eight months ago, President Obama put on a grand show for the troops. [...] Obama condemned the "inexcusable conduct" at VA hospitals across the country (and under his own watch).  He vowed to "do right by all who served under our proud flag."  He promised America's veterans new "reform," "resources," "timely care" and an end to the disgraceful disability backlog.  The bill he signed, in case you'd forgotten, included $10 billion in emergency funding to pay for veterans to go outside the chronically dysfunctional VA system if they are facing long wait times or live 40 miles or more from a VA facility, plus another $6.3 billion to set up 27 new clinics and hire doctors, nurses and other medical staff.  So, how's it all working out?  About as well as every other "success story" Obama has signed his name to:  abysmally, ineffectually and incompetently.

Obama's VA Spent $3.3 Billion on the Agency's Buildings as Vets Died Awaiting Care.  The VA's budget has increased every year under the Obama administration.  In its budget fact sheet for FY 2015, the administration pointed out that "total VA funding has grown in 2015 by nearly 68 percent from 2009."  Records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon suggest that the VA has not neglected its facilities.  A review of records available the official government spending website shows the VA spending $3.3 billion on facility upgrades and expansions between 2010 [and] 2015, the budgets for which the administration is responsible.

Veterans Affairs officials changed 20 year-old benefit claim to appear only 14 days old.  Department of Veterans Affairs officials in the agency's Little Rock, Ark., facility changed the dates on patients' healthcare claims to conceal the fact that veterans had waited up to 20 years to learn if they would receive benefits for their injuries.  The VA inspector general's discovery, made public Thursday [2/26/2015], showed officials at the Little Rock regional office continued to tamper with patient records even after the practice had sparked national outrage as the VA scandal exploded.  In July 2014, the inspector general received an anonymous tip that staff at the VA office in Little Rock, Arkansas were changing the dates on veterans' claims.

No, the VA has not fired 60 people for manipulating wait-time data.  The VA scandal unfolded after whistleblower allegations that dozens of veterans died at the Phoenix VA while waiting for care.  During a House hearing, the VA Office of Inspector General acknowledged that wait lists may have contributed to the veterans' deaths.  Patient and appointment record falsifications and manipulations were then found to be a systemic, years-long problem. Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned as more allegations surfaced.

VA Reform DOA.  President Obama and the Veterans Administration bureaucracy are already sabotaging the VA reform law passed in August.  The ink is barely dry on the 8.6 million "Choice Cards" that supposedly allow vets to see a doctor outside the delay-plagued system.  But Obama's budget tries to snatch the $10 billion allocated for choice and allow it to be spent however VA top administrators want.  It's a sickening betrayal.  Even worse, VA Secretary Robert McDonald is telling federal lawmakers that this underhanded move will better serve "VA system priorities."  That's the problem.  He's more interested in protecting "the system" than vets.  It's all about bureaucratic turf and union jobs.

VA Secretary Robert McDonald States That He's Fired 900 Employees.  On Sunday, Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald appeared on NBC to defend his recent track record of holding the VA accountable.  According to McDonald, from the start of his tenure as secretary, 900 employees have been fired.  After an embarrassing incident earlier in the week in which he lost his cool at a House Veterans' Affairs Committee hearing, McDonald told Chuck Todd on "Meet the Press" that he's made fundamental and drastic changes to core VA leadership.

VA secretary hits back at lawmaker: 'What have you done?'  Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald had a heated exchange with Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.) at a hearing on Wednesday [2/11/2015] as he defended his work at the troubled agency. [...] "This is a department mired in bureaucratic incompetence and corruption," Coffman said earlier in the hearing.  "And I got to tell you, I think the public relations is great today.  But there is no substance, there is no substance.

Veteran who waited one year for the VA to grant him a cancer screening dies of the disease.  A Vietnam veteran denied a vital cancer checkup for more than a year by the VA in Atlanta died at home on Saturday [1/10/2015].  Great-grandfather, Norman Spivey, 64, passed away from complications arising from Stage 4 colon cancer that had spread to his liver and lymph nodes.  He was seen for the first time and diagnosed as terminal in July and Spivey's wife, Gayla, has revealed her fury at the fatal delay.

Obama avoids Phoenix VA hospital, holds event less than mile away.  Ignoring calls by veterans and Republicans to visit a Veterans Affairs hospital in Phoenix that launched a health care scandal, President Obama gave a speech about homeownership instead Thursday — less than a mile from the VA facility.  Mr. Obama announced a plan to cut mortgage fees charged by the Federal Housing Authority, saying the move will save the average family $900 per year and will make it easier for people to buy their first home.  It's part of his agenda for his State of the Union address on Jan. 20.

Audit from 2012 found VA clinics had been warned 'not to game the system'.  A 2012 audit accused Department of Veterans Affairs clinical offices in Arizona, New Mexico and western Texas of routinely canceling appointments in blocks to manipulate wait times despite a nationwide directive from top VA officials "not to game the system."  According to the Arizona Republic, the disturbing audit also charged that VA employees at 3,400 clinics in the three states often recorded walk-in patients as scheduled visits to make it appear ailing veterans were being seen without any wait time at all, when, in fact, the reason they were there at all was because they couldn't schedule an appointment.

'Corrosive culture' at VA has led to significant failures in health care, White House review finds.  The troubled Veterans Affairs health care system is plagued by a "corrosive culture" of mismanagement and distrust that has had significant negative impacts on medical treatment for veterans, according to a White House review.  A summary of the review, which was done by deputy White House chief of staff Rob Nabors and released Friday, says the environment within the Veterans Health Administration hurt morale and affected the timeliness of health care, and the division of the department must be restructured.

1,000 VA workers facing disciplinary action, McDonald says.  The Veterans Affairs Department is considering disciplinary action against more than 1,000 employees as it struggles to correct systemic problems that led to long wait times for veterans seeking health care and falsification of records to cover up delays, VA Secretary Robert McDonald said.

VA acting chief says 18 veterans left off waiting list have died.  In the latest development in the mounting scandal surrounding the Department for Veterans Affairs, the acting head of the agency says that 18 of the 1,700 veterans kept off an official electronic appointment list have since died.  Acting VA Secretary Sloan Gibson said in a visit to Phoenix Thursday that he would ask the inspector general to see if there is any indication those deaths were related to long wait times.  If so, they would reach out to those veterans' families.

Shock but no surprise: Obama administration knew about VA lists since 2010.  There are many end of the year lists — but there was a list this year no one wanted to be on, and that's a Veterans Administration wait list.  Even more disturbing revelations are emerging about the VA scandal, but the question is, does anyone even care?

VA fires Sharon Helman, head of Phoenix hospital at center of scandal.  The Veterans Affairs Department removed the head of its Phoenix hospital facility Monday, more than six months after whistleblowers said veterans were dying while on secret wait-lists there, though veterans groups said the department still has a long way to go to rebuild trust.  Sharon Helman, the director of the Phoenix VA health care system, was officially fired Monday, though she has been on administrative leave since May.

Overdue Changes Finally Reach Veterans Affairs.  Three-and-a-half months on the job, [Robert] McDonald on Monday [11/10/2014] announced the first steps of a major reorganization of the much-maligned department, with the changes centered around his goal of focusing on the VA's core customer:  Veterans.

New VA chief may fire 1,000 staffers over healthcare scandal.  Three months after taking the helm, Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald unveiled plans to create a chief customer service officer tasked with overseeing an agency-wide program to streamline the department's regional centers into a single network.  In an interview with CBS' "60 Minutes" on Sunday, McDonald said that 35 staffers also will lose their jobs and 1,000 additional workers may be fired — all of whom "violated our values," he told the program.

Emails show White House "requested" IG to change VA scandal report.  Almost two months ago, a whistleblower from inside the Department of Veteran Affairs claimed that the Inspector General watered down the final report in the VA's wait-list scandal to minimize the political damage.  IG Richard Griffin denied that he had been pressured to adjust his findings, which the Arizona Republic found used a nearly impossible standard for responsibility to get the VA off the hook for hundreds of fraud-related deaths.  On Friday [10/31/2014], though, the House Committee on Veteran Affairs published e-mails that clearly show the White House demanding those changes to the final report.

Five months after Shinseki resigned, the VA is still an abominable disaster.  It was less than five months ago that President Barack Obama accepted the resignation of his Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Eric Shinseki, in the wake of the scandal involving a systematic cover-up of waiting times and related deaths at VA hospitals. [...] According to The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the Department of Veterans Affairs has made the inexplicable decision to promote an administrator who advised his colleagues against disclosing a deadly Legionnaires' Disease outbreak at a Pennsylvania hospital.

6 Times Obama Declared Crisis, Then Did Nothing.  After news broke that the VA had deliberately lied to veterans about their waitlists, leading many vets to die waiting in line, President Obama declared a state of political emergency:  "If these allegations prove to be true, it is dishonorable, it is disgraceful, and I will not tolerate it, period."  After initially backing VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, he then threw Shinseki under the bus.  And that's been about it.  Nothing material has actually been solved.

Phoenix VA hospital fails outside compliance review.  The Department of Veterans Affairs health-care system in Phoenix does not comply with U.S. standards for safety, patient care and management, according to a non-profit organization that reviews medical facilities nationwide.  In findings published online, The Joint Commission says Carl T. Hayden VA Medical Center failed a July inspection in 13 quality-control categories. [...] The inspectors also determined that VA employees were unable to report concerns "without retaliatory action from the hospital."

VA announces it will get around to firing four senior officials in scandal.  Impressed?  Not everyone is, considering the circumstances, timing, and personnel involved.  Congress gave the new Secretary of Veterans Affairs broader powers to dismiss officials who contributed to the VA's wait-list scandal before leaving on their summer recess.

VA moves to fire 4 senior executives due to scandal.  The Veterans Affairs Department said it is firing four senior executives as officials move to crack down on wrongdoing following a nationwide scandal over long wait times for veterans seeking medical care, and falsified records covering up the delays.

Louisiana VA hospital lacks pajamas and sheets, but spends millions on new furniture, TVs and solar.  Veterans at the Shreveport, La., Veterans Affairs hospital have been going without toothbrushes, toothpaste, pajamas, sheets and blankets while department officials spend money on new Canadian-made furniture, televisions to run public service announcements and solar panels, a Watchdog investigation has revealed.  Sources inside the hospital told Watchdog.org that patients also have had to contend with substandard care, as many nurses spend less time on work than on cell phones, iPods or accessing personal data on hospital computers.

VA whistleblowers win settlements in retaliation cases.  The Department of Veterans Affairs has reached settlements with three whistleblowers who helped expose wrongdoing at the Phoenix VA hospital, where details of a nationwide record-keeping scandal emerged this year.  The U.S. Office of Special Counsel, a small federal agency that investigates whistleblower complaints, announced the settlements on Monday [9/29/2014].  At least two of the agreements involve promotions, signaling that the agency wants to reward employees who report bad practices.

How Soon We Forget the Veteran Who Attacked the White House.  [Scroll down]  One of the reasons that veterans don't seek care, the VA admits, is that veterans don't trust the VA — they don't believe treatment is effective and they have problems with access, such as cost or location of treatment.

Dem Congressman Skipped VA Hearing, Attended Fundraiser on Same Day.  Rep. Bruce Braley (D., Iowa) skipped a key Veterans' Affairs (VA) Committee hearing in 2012 on the same day he had a fundraiser, again raising questions about his commitment to veterans' issues, Republicans say.  The GOP had already pounced on Braley for missing a hearing held by the full House VA Committee on Sept. 20, 2012, where lawmakers discussed long wait times for veterans' mental health care, the backlog of disability claims, and the stewardship of VA funding.  He also attended three fundraisers that day.  Government records show that Braley, this year's Democratic Senate candidate in Iowa, also missed a VA hearing on Feb. 15, 2012.

Government mistakenly withheld $2.4 million in disability from vets.  The federal government accidentally withheld $2.4 million out of September disability compensation checks for 12,000 veterans owed the money for service-related physical or emotional disabilities, according to the Department of Veterans.  The VA, which apologized for the mistake Wednesday [9/3/2014], says it has worked with the U.S. Department of Treasury to pay back all the money either by direct deposit or with checks sent by mail.

VA Investigation Reveals Poor Care, Fake Reports and 'Nationwide Systemic Problem'.  A scathing report issued by the inspector general for the Department of Veterans Affairs confirmed that former military personnel faced persistent problems accessing care at the agency's medical facilities and that staff faked reports indicating the appointments operation was running smoothly.  Acting Inspector General Richard J. Griffin couldn't, however, substantiate earlier reports that 40 deaths or more could be attributed to poor VA care, noting that the whistleblower who made the allegation "did not provide us with a list of 40 patient names."

'Corrosive culture' at VA has led to significant failures in health care, White House review finds.  The troubled Veterans Affairs health care system is plagued by a "corrosive culture" of mismanagement and distrust that has had significant negative impacts on medical treatment for veterans, according to a White House review.  A summary of the review, which was done by deputy White House chief of staff Rob Nabors and released Friday [6/27/2014], says the environment within the Veterans Health Administration hurt morale and affected the timeliness of health care, and the division of the department must be restructured.

Records show Obama met just once with Shinseki during VA scandal.  President Obama touted the newly passed Veterans Affairs reform bill Thursday [8/7/2014] as he signed the measure into law and lamented the scandal that triggered it.  But a review of records by Fox News shows the president — despite the urgency he placed publicly on the crisis — only met one-on-one with then-VA Secretary Eric Shinseki once during the scandal.  The records, provided through a Freedom of Information Act request, showed they met on May 30, the day Shinseki resigned.

No one left to blame: Obama owns Veterans Affairs reform now.  [Scroll down]  Based on what we've seen from Obama in the past, veterans groups should be wary of this administration's commitment to fully implementing these reforms.  From his learning of VA scandals "from news reports," to his disengaged, almost forced acceptance of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki's resignation, to his tepid response to evidence of reprisals against whistleblowers, Obama's lack of attention to this issue has been deeply revealing.  One thing is for certain: Now that it's the law, the success of VA reform will depend solely on how Obama and his administration choose to enforce it.

Lawmakers unveil $17 billion bill to reform Veterans Affairs.  The proposal, co-authored by House Veterans' Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller, R-Fla., includes a major reform provision aimed at allowing the Department of Veterans Affairs secretary to immediately fire senior employees who currently enjoy an appeals period that can last for years.  The plan would allow the VA secretary to immediately fire senior workers who are incompetent or who lie, allowing them a 21-day appeal period.

Veterans Deal Expands Medical Care, Includes $15 Billion.  A rare bipartisan deal in the U.S. Congress would spend about $17 billion to help ease U.S. military veterans' long waits for medical care.  The deal announced today expands the type of non-VA hospitals and clinics where veterans could receive care, authorizes leases for 27 new VA facilities, and allows the Department of Veterans Affairs secretary to fire senior executives.  It includes about $12 billion in emergency spending and about $5 billion in offsets within the VA's budget, said Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Jeff Miller.

The Editor says...
Senator Sanders is an Independent.  Representative Jeff Miller is a Republican.  If the two of them agree, that's not "bipartisan."

Hundreds of Vets Died or Injured Under VA Care, Data Shows.  Hundreds of veterans suffered harm or died from medical mistakes termed "adverse events" while receiving care from the Department of Veterans Affairs last year, according to new data obtained by NBC.  Through a Freedom of Information Act request, NBC found 575 of the estimated 6 million patients annually treated by the department were affected by adverse events, up 74 percent from 330 in 2010.  The VA did not disclose details or individual outcomes.

Group: New VA health leader suspended whistleblower.  The Department of Veterans Affairs' new regional health-care boss in the Southwest, now responsible for instituting reforms, suspended an employee in California last month after he reported that patients in Palo Alto were being endangered, according to a national watchdog group.  The Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan organization, says Elizabeth J. Freeman, interim director at the Southwest Regional Health Care Network, put the employee on leave after he was accused of "disrespectful correspondence" — a written complaint about mismanagement of medications.

White House warned about 'antiquated' VA scheduling system 5 years ago.  Acting Veteran Affairs Secretary Sloan Gibson assured Congress last week that the VA is working hard to replace its "antiquated" scheduling system, but the Obama administration first received clear notice more than five years ago about the need for an overhaul to reduce patient wait times.  "Excessive wait times are addressed by moving to a resource-based management system," Veterans Affairs technology officials told the Obama-Biden transition team in a briefing report that included mention of VA's "schedule replacement" project.

The VA Debacle.  The breadth of problems at the VA has proven continually surprising, even as the torrent of unrelated bad news knocks new revelations about VA corruption off the front pages.  The Office of Special Counsel investigating the VA is looking into 67 whistleblower complaints — 25 of which have been initiated since June 1.  Just last week, a Philadelphia VA employee told Congress that mail "sat in boxes untouched for years" at the pension office.  VA workers then falsified dates to make the backlog of claims appear smaller, thus ensuring they got bonuses and salary increases.

VA secretary: Staff reacted properly to treat vet who died waiting for ambulance.  Acting Secretary Sloan Gibson visited Albuquerque on Thursday [7/17/2014] with high praise for the VA hospital's staff.  He said the staff "reacted properly" when a veteran collapsed in the hospital's cafeteria and later died.  Jim Napoleon Garcia, 71, waited half an hour for an ambulance to take him 500 yards away to the emergency room.  He received CPR on the floor during that time.

Veterans Affairs spies, stonewalls on people investigating it.  Congressional staffers investigating data falsification and whistleblower retaliation at the Department of Veterans Affairs regional office in Philadelphia were given a workspace there that was wired with activated audio microphones and video cameras, the chairman of the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs said Monday [7/14/2015].  Committee investigators also glimpsed a notebook used by the agency's regional director that bore written instructions to ignore their requests for information, Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., said during a late-night hearing.

Mrs. Obama's Operation VA Scandal Distraction.  Barack and Michelle Obama are quite the diversionary tag-team.  He blames everyone else for his problems.  She takes credit for progress on his behalf that he doesn't deserve and distracts public attention from his avalanche of failures with endless feel-good photo-ops.

Michelle Obama talks veterans' jobs and homes — but not VA healthcare.  This is what it means to be first lady:  you enjoy a 66% popularity rating, almost 20 points higher than your husband's.  And you can give an entire speech about the needs of veterans — for homes and good jobs — without ever having to refer to the conflagration over their medical care that has enveloped his White House.

Disarray, data manipulation at Phila. VA, report finds.  Inspectors surveying Philadelphia's Veterans Affairs benefits center in June found two stunning signs of disarray:  mail bins brimming with claims dating to 2011 and other benefits that had been paid twice.  More alarming, the team from the VA Office of Inspector General found evidence that staff tasked with managing pensions for the eastern United States were manipulating dates to make old claims appear new, according to a report obtained by The [Philadelphia] Inquirer.  The findings are the first clear evidence that the city's VA system is not immune from controversies that have plagued other centers and sparked a growing scandal over delayed care and services affecting veterans nationwide.

Obama: treacherous or incompetent?  The Obama administration knew about allegations of secret waiting lists at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) as early as 2010, although, on May 19, 2014, White House spokesman claimed Obama learned about the scandal only recently through press reports.

Veterans Affairs officials claim agency cannot revoke bonuses, contradicting earlier statements to congressional committee.  Bonuses paid to top executives at the Department of Veterans Affairs who committed misconduct cannot be rescinded, an agency official testified Friday, in direct contradiction to what he told a different panel less than a month ago. [...] In May, VA officials claimed they had rescinded a $9,345 performance bonus paid in 2013 to Sharon Helman, who was the director of the Phoenix VA hospital where the scandal over phony waiting lists first erupted.  Agency officials claimed at the time that Helman's bonus was rescinded because it was improperly paid due to an administrative error.  While VA officials say Helman's bonus was rescinded, they have not confirmed the money has been recovered.

Whistleblowers Tell Congress about Culture of Retaliation at the VA.  Four whistleblowers at the Department of Veterans Affairs told a congressional panel about the forms of retaliation suffered after their attempts to report wrongdoing in the agency.  Their testimony came as a federal investigative agency said it was examining 67 claims of retaliation by supervisors at the VA against employees who filed whistleblower complaints.

TheDC Uncovers Another VA Backlog: Months Of Neglected Medical Records.  The Memphis VA Medical Center has yet another medical records backlog, The Daily Caller has learned — this one estimated at three to five months long.  According to the whistleblower, who provided the photo of this second set of medical records piling up at the Memphis VA Medical Center, the individual responsible for scanning in these records is Carnell Clark, an employee at the facility who is currently busy helping to catch up on a backlog TheDC exposed in June.

VA chiefs who stifled whistleblowers got $100,000 in bonuses.  The Department of Veterans Affairs paid out more than $100,000 in bonuses last year to top executives at facilities that ignored whistleblower complaints of poor patient care.  Whistleblowers have played key roles in uncovering systemic problems at VA hospitals across the country, revealing long wait times, cooked appointment books and bad treatment of veterans.  Although the VA later confirmed many of the accusations, officials often failed to take reports seriously and, in some cases, retaliated against the whistleblowers, employees and government investigators told Congress on Tuesday [7/8/2014].

VA Whistleblower: I Have Experienced 'Harassment' Since Contacting Rob Nabors With Concerns.  Veterans Affairs employee and whistleblower Scott Davis discussed "harassment" he endured after revealing concerns about the embattled department to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rob Nabors Tuesday at a Veterans Affairs Committee hearing.  "The harassment I have experienced at the HEC from top levels of management include my whistleblower complaint to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rob Nabors was leaked to my manager Sherry Williams, who stated in writing, that she was contacting me on behalf of Acting Secretary [Sloan] Gibson and Mr. Rob Nabors," he said.  "Neither Mr. Gibson nor Mr. Nabors have responded to this fact."

Nurse: VA Medical Staff Stole Morphine From Dying Patients.  Vials of morphine were systemically stolen from a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center and replaced with water and saline so that dying veterans got the wrong treatments, a longtime VA nurse told The Daily Caller.  "A nurse taking care of hospice patients over the past year had been diverting vials of morphine," said Valerie Riviello, a 28-year veteran nurse at the Albany Stratton VA Medical Center in Albany, New York.  "Those patients that were dying in hospice were not getting their intended pain medication."  Management became aware of the recurring theft without reporting it to higher levels of governance within the VA system, said Riviello, a Florence Nightingale Award winner for nursing.

Millions of tax dollars in 'sordid' bonuses paid to top Veterans' Affairs administrators.  Hefty performance bonuses were paid last year to 64 Department of Veterans Affairs medical directors who oversaw hospitals, including some where patient wait lists were falsified and preventable patient deaths occurred, according to data obtained by the Washington Examiner.  Also collecting a merit bonus of $12,579 last year was John Pierce, the head of the agency's medical inspection unit, who retired this month after being slammed by the independent Office of Special Counsel for downplaying whistleblower complaints about inadequate patient care.

The Health Care Waiting Game.  Americans look down on national health systems like Canada's and Britain's because of their notorious waiting lists.  In recent weeks, the Veterans Affairs hospitals have been pilloried for long patient wait times, with top officials losing their jobs.  Yet there is emerging evidence that lengthy waits to get a doctor's appointment have become the norm in many parts of American medicine, particularly for general doctors but also for specialists.  And that includes patients with private insurance as well as those with Medicaid or Medicare.

VA medical inspector retires amid criticism of response to whistleblower complaints.  The head of the Office of the Medical Inspector for Veterans Affairs has retired, just over a week after a scathing letter and report criticized that office for failing to adequately respond to complaints from whistleblowers and downplaying the severity of problems at some VA facilities.

VA fix could cost billions.  The VA's data on patient wait times is so bad that Congress's official scorekeeper can't even calculate the costs for fixing the agency, and that has become a major hurdle as lawmakers push for a quick fix on Capitol Hill.  The House and Senate each have passed bills to try to get a handle on the wait times and other problems afflicting care at VA clinics, but when negotiators from each chamber met last month to try to hammer out a compromise, they ran into problems over the cost.

Inside the VA's Spin-'N-Stonewall Machine.  The Public and Intergovernmental Affairs Office of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is very concerned.  No, the communications specialists in the agency are not concerned with veterans in need.  They're not concerned with citizens and public officials requesting public information.  They're not concerned with journalists seeking the truth.  What these entrenched government employees care most about, above all else, is the business of spin and stonewalling.

VA Offers Doctor's Appointment to Vietnam Vet Who Died Two Years Ago.  Nearly two years after he requested an appointment with a Veterans Affairs hospital, Vietnam veteran Doug Chase finally got approved for a visit to a primary care doctor.  Unfortunately, he'd died in August 2012 of a brain tumor.  Suzanne Chase, his widow, received a letter dated June 12, 2014 saying he could now call doctors at a Bedford, MA hospital to schedule an appointment.  "We are committed to providing primary care in a timely manner and would greatly appreciate a prompt response," it read at the bottom.

The White House Gets the VA Story Exactly Backwards.  Sad to say, the Obama administration seems clueless about what might be broken at the VA and how to fix it.  Either that, or it is just cravenly saying and doing whatever it thinks is necessary to make the story go away.  Evidence for the clueless hypothesis came on Friday [6/27/2014], when White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rob Nabors weighed in with his diagnosis of what ails the VA.  The document is extraordinary in its contradictions, sloppy formulations, and non-evidence-based conclusions.

New VA secretary not a health care expert.  Veterans groups worry that [Robert] McDonald may have trouble adjusting to a far-flung bureaucracy of more than 300,000 employees, where hundreds of hospital directors and other career executives wield great power far from Washington.

How Obama plays us time and time again.  In 2007-08 Obama ran to once and for all get the Veterans Administration serving veterans, instead of its own bonused bureaucracy.  Last week his aide delivered a blistering evaluation of a crippled VA, requiring a basic overhaul.  That report came 1,984 days after Obama took office.  In a Friday news dump to attract minimal attention.  And Obama's team just discovered this deadly dysfunction?

50 VA hospital workers claim retaliation for blowing whistle on the horrors they saw.  When Valerie Riviello, a nurse at a Veterans Affairs facility in New York, saw the clinic restrain a sexual assault survivor to a bed for seven consecutive hours, she released the woman.  The next day, Ms. Riviello said, she was removed from her post as senior nurse manager and given a full-time desk job that prohibited her from contact with patients.  She eventually was reprimanded and is facing a 30-day unpaid suspension for releasing the woman.  Now, Ms. Riviello is one of more than 50 whistleblowers who say the Veterans Affairs Department retaliated against them for trying to do their jobs.

As Veterans Waited For Treatment, VA Hospitals Spent $420 Million On Solar Panels.  If you thought the fiasco engulfing Veterans Affairs (VA) couldn't get any worse, you were wrong.  It seems that VA hospitals spent around $420 million dollars on solar panels and windmills, while veterans languished on appointment waiting lists.  Some have died as a result.

A Struggling Agency Beset With Ills.  Citing "significant and chronic system failures" in the nation's health system for veterans, a review ordered by President Barack Obama portrays the Department of Veterans Affairs as a struggling agency battling a corrosive culture of distrust, lacking in resources and ill-prepared to deal with an influx of new and older veterans with a range of medical and mental health care needs.

Bill crafted in response to VA scandal gets pushed off.  As lawmakers prepare to skip town for the Fourth of July holiday next week, a long to-do list will remain in their wake.  While that's nothing new — especially in an election year, getting just about anything of substance done is an achievement — Congress is set to leave without finalizing its response to the burgeoning Veterans Affairs health care scandal that cost a Cabinet secretary his job and is tied to numerous reported deaths.

Media Bias and the Obama Scandals.  We live in a strange time.  Historically, reporters and editors have believed that their job is to disseminate news.  That is no longer true. [...] On the VA, don't get me started.  Just today, more details about the scandal emerged — secret waiting lists, altered records, dying veterans.  A year or two ago, leftists like Paul Krugman were touting the VA as evidence that socialized medicine is a smashing success.  Mightn't the current scandal tell us something about the desirability of government-administered medicine?  Our reporters and editors won't touch that angle with a stick.

However Bad You Think the VA Scandal Is, It's Much Worse.  The casualty number from the VA scandal just grew from a few dozen to 1,000.  That's according to a report compiled by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK).

Poor care at VA hospitals cost 1,000 veterans their lives, report says.  The problems at Veterans Affairs extend well beyond long wait lists, with a report Tuesday showing the department is plagued with poor care that has cost up to 1,000 veterans their lives and left taxpayers on the hook for nearly $1 billion in malpractice settlements since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Some of the problems detailed in the report by Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma are downright ghoulish.  They include the case of a former security chief at a New York Veterans Affairs medical center whom the FBI arrested on charges of plotting to kidnap, rape and murder women and children.

VA deaths covered up to make statistics look better, whistle-blower says.  Records of dead veterans were changed or physically altered, some even in recent weeks, to hide how many people died while waiting for care at the Phoenix VA hospital, a whistle-blower told CNN in stunning revelations that point to a new coverup in the ongoing VA scandal.  "Deceased" notes on files were removed to make statistics look better, so veterans would not be counted as having died while waiting for care, Pauline DeWenter said.  DeWenter should know.  DeWenter is the actual scheduling clerk at the Phoenix VA who said for the better part of a year she was ordered by supervisors to manage and handle the so-called "secret waiting list," where veterans' names of those seeking medical care were often placed, sometimes left for months with no care at all.

The Golden Days of Government under Emperor Obama.  We have seen the Obama Administration routinely review its own actions for illegality — Eric Holder, for example, conducted a vigorous inquiry into the possible lawless behavior of Eric Holder.  This, as you know, was the ultimate chessmatch between investigator and target, a battle of two masters.  It was like a game of wits between Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarity, if both were corrupt and both were dullards.  But in case you think that's a case of favoritism for the high-ranking officials in the Obama Administration, Think Again, Buddy.  The policy is extended downwards to mid-level managers, too.

VA brass knew of false data for 2 years.  Department of Veterans Affairs administrators knew two years ago that employees throughout the Southwest were manipulating data on doctor appointments and failed to stop the practice despite a national directive, according to records obtained by The Arizona Republic through a Freedom of Information Act request.  A 2012 audit by the VA's Southwest Health Care Network found that facilities in Arizona, New Mexico and western Texas chronically violated department policy and created inaccurate data on patient wait times via a host of tactics.

CBS and NBC Skip New VA Scandal Outrage; ABC Gives News Just 14 Seconds.  Despite the newest revelation in the Veterans Affairs scandal on Thursday [6/19/2013] that one in ten veterans have to wait at least one month before they can get an appointment to see a doctor, CBS and NBC refused to cover the latest news in both their evening news shows on Thursday night as well as their morning shows on Friday morning.  ABC News only gave 14 seconds of coverage to the issue in a news brief during the 7:00 am hour on Friday's Good Morning America.  CBS News chose to instead publish an article about it on their website Thursday afternoon.

Phoenix VA: ousted exec keeps salary while on leave.  The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs disclosed Friday [6/20/2013] during a congressional hearing that Sharon Helman, the former Phoenix VA Health Care System administrator placed on leave last month amid a patient-care scandal, continues to receive her full salary — roughly $170,000 annually.  The VA has acknowledged her facility manipulated patient wait-time records to trigger bonuses.  The U.S. House Veterans' Affairs Committee on Friday examined how the VA awards bonuses and whether the criteria used to grant them reward executives who engage in bad behavior or create incentives to falsify information.

A Fed-Up Veteran Blasts VA's "Lie, Delay, Deny" Abyss.  This former Special Forces soldier and medic served his country for 25 years.  He worked in the health care field managing military field medical clinics.  "I know how health care is supposed to run, even in austere or low-budget environments," he says.  And in his nightmarish, ongoing experience, the VA is an epic, deadly, monstrous failure.  He minces no words:  "They're getting billions of dollars, and they treat veterans like [excrement].  There's no accountability, no buy-in, among civilian unionized employees.  We mean nothing to them.  It's like going to the DMV for your health care."

VA destroyed records to cover up massive cancellations for wait-list fraud.  Judicial Watch has found documentation that shows a deliberate effort to destroy documentation relating to massive cancellations of appointments at the VA in order to falsify wait times.  In a press release this morning [6/18/2014], the watchdog group lays out the findings from documents accessed through FOIA demands that vindicate one whistleblower and expose the wider fraud effort that went far beyond scheduling.

Phoenix VA gave 10 mil in in bonuses in last 3 years.  Newly released records show the Phoenix VA Health Care System paid out roughly $10 million in bonuses during the past three years, when some staff manipulated patient wait-time records to trigger bonuses as veterans died awaiting care.  The Arizona Republic, after asking for bonus records at least 10 times since March, obtained the data Friday [6/13/2014] from the Department of Veteran Affairs under the federal Freedom of Information Act.  Bonus payouts increased significantly under Sharon Helman, who became director of the Phoenix VA in February 2012.

House Chairman: VA Instructed Employees To Stonewall Investigation.  Officials in the Obama administration's Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) appear to have illegally instructed VA employees to stonewall a congressional investigation into the department's scandals, according to House Committee on Veterans Affairs chairman Rep. Jeff Miller. [...] Miller, who is investigating VA for secret waiting lists and other factors that led to preventable veteran deaths at VA medical clinics, warned that VA supervisors "can face adverse employment action and have payment of their salaries suspended" for impeding Congress.

Bedside rationing is coming with Obamacare but doctors can stop it.  National uproar over the Veterans Affairs scandal should refocus the nation's attention to the issue of health care rationing.  Under VA care, 40 patients died while waiting for treatment at a Phoenix, Ariz., facility.  Not only is that the tip of the iceberg in terms of what government-run health care means for patients, it should also sound the alarm about the newest tactic for rationing care, bedside rationing.

Mired In a Scandal In Which Ailing Veterans Died, the VA Tweets About... Global Warming?  The Veterans Administration's scandal has spread nationwide, to dozens of facilities.  It has cost former administrator, Gen. Eric Shinseki, his job.  It is discrediting the very idea that our government can keep any promise or do anything useful at all.

Obama Administration Knew About VA's Secret Wait Lists For Years.  The Obama administration knew about allegations of secret waiting lists at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) as early as 2010, The Daily Caller has learned.  The current VA scandal involving secret waiting lists that led to preventable veteran deaths at the Phoenix VA Medical Center claimed the scalp of Obama-appointed former VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, who resigned at the end of last month.  Former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said that President Obama only found about the VA wait-list scandal from watching the news.  But the Obama administration knew that an internal VA investigation into secret "paper" waiting lists was conducted in 2010 under Shinseki.

A brief and painful reminder that Washington is filled with flippant and incompetent halfwits.  Each of these events involves several dead Americans, some in the line of duty, some waiting for medical attention and some waiting for reinforcements that would never come.  Very little has been done to find and punish those responsible for these events.

VA bill shooting through Congress could cost taxpayers billions, fiscal hawks warn.  Fiscal hawks are warning that new legislation passed in both chambers of Congress this week in response to the Veteran Affairs scandal could cost taxpayers more than $500 billion over the next decade.  A Senate source told FoxNews.com on Friday that lawmakers "passed a bill they didn't read which led to Congress issuing a blank check with real consequences for the country down the road."

Congressmen charge VA told local VA hospital to stymie their search for information.  Two Pennsylvania congressmen, one Democrat and one Republican, charge that officials within the national Department of Veterans Affairs tried to stall, if not block, their attempts to find out about hundreds of veterans on wait lists for years, waiting for health care appointments at the Pittsburgh VA.  If the charges are true, the VA officials responsible should be terminated, chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Florida, told CNN.

VA Crises Getting Lost in Scandal Overload.  President Obama is embroiled in two Veterans Affairs scandals:  1) fabricated documents and secret waiting lists for health care, with dozens of veterans dying while waiting for appointments; and 2) waiting lists for disability benefits.  The former is now the subject of a criminal investigation opened by the Phoenix office of the FBI just days after the release of a bipartisan letter from 21 U.S. senators to the Department of Justice calling for a criminal investigation.  "Evidence of secret waiting times, falsification of records, destruction of documents, and other potential criminal wrongdoing has appalled and angered the nation, and imperiled trust and confidence in the Veterans Health Administration," the senators wrote in the letter, which was sent late last week to Attorney General Eric Holder.

Medical Advocate: Senate-Backed VA Bill 'Sabotages' Vets' Ability to Access Civilian Care.  The founder and chair of a group dedicated to reducing hospital infection deaths told the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs Thursday that a bill backed by the Senate Wednesday [6/11/2014] to address the backlog of veterans awaiting medical care "is designed to protect union jobs, not ailing vets."  The bill drafted by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, "will not save the lives of vets stuck on the wait list," said Dr. Betsy McCaughey, chair of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths.  "This bill as currently written is designed to protect union jobs, not ailing vets."

VA Spent Tens of Millions on Ad Campaigns, Audits, Green Energy.  An analysis of more than $1 billion dollars in spending by the Department of Veterans Affairs on "professional services" finds several instances of questionable spending, including millions for a national ad campaign and energy programs to make VA facilities more sustainable.  The spending comes in light of the ongoing allegations of misconduct and an audit that revealed potentially fraudulent practices at 90 VA centers.

Congress, FBI Moving on VA Health Care.  FBI Director James Comey said Wednesday [6/11/2014] that the investigation was being led by the FBI's field office in Phoenix, which he described as the "primary locus of the original allegations" being investigated by the VA's Office of Inspector General.

Fictions as Truth.  For the VA mess, the Obama administration would have us believe:  [#1] The mess, to the extent that it was a mess, was largely a result of prior policies of the Bush administration as Barack Obama pointed out as early as 2008.  [#2] The Bush wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were largely responsible for the delays in service, as hundreds of thousands of new vets were dumped into the system. [...] [#5] The VA scandal is mostly, like the IRS brouhaha, a regional matter with no national implications.

VA Official Concedes 'Integrity Issue', Apologizes.  A top Veterans Affairs Department official is acknowledging "an integrity issue here among some of our leaders" as the embattled agency reels from mounting evidence that workers fabricated data on veterans' waits for medical appointments in an effort to mask frequent, long delays.

Sam Johnson once again attacks Obama on POW swap.  Rep. Sam Johnson, a former prisoner of war, called President Obama's deal to free U.S. soldier Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl "ill-advised, inappropriate and immature" in a letter he sent to his colleagues in Congress Monday [6/9/2014].  "While U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif, and I don't agree on much, we agree that President Obama broke the law when he released the five top terrorists in exchange for a detained American soldier," he said.

Senior WH Official: VA Not Overhauled Because 'We Don't Do Small Stuff Well'.  In a Monday [6/9/2014] National Journal column about how many Democrats are allegedly saying they have "quit" on Obama — claims I find quite hollow, given that no one asserting this has yet had the guts to go on the record — Ron Fournier quotes "a senior White House official" with a head-shaking take on the Veterans Administration scandal.

VA reportedly stopped sending teams to try to improve underperforming hospitals.  The Department of Veterans Affairs suspended a program that sent teams of doctors and monitors to try to improve its worst-performing facilities for approximately two years, according to a published report.  The Wall Street Journal, citing agency doctors and internal records, reported that the visits were "paused" beginning in early 2011.  Dr. Carolyn Clancy, the head of the agency's quality and safety program, said the VA had begun to revive the program about a year ago.

VA says more than 57,000 patients are waiting for first visit.  The Department of Veterans Affairs on Monday [6/9/2014] shed light on the depth of the VA scheduling scandal and substantiated claims that rank-and-file employees were directed to manipulate records.  The agency said about 100,000 veterans are experiencing long wait times for appointments and that about 13 percent of VA schedulers have said they were told to falsify appointment-request dates to give the impression that wait times were shorter than they really were.

The VA Bureaucracy on Trial.  When Woodward and Bernstein did their groundbreaking reporting in the 1970s, they uncovered abuse of power and corruption that led to the resignation of the nation's highest elected official.  It was what a free press can and should do:  keep government honest.  But Watergate was ultimately a story about one man and one administration.  The VA story is about something much larger:  systemic corruption at one of our biggest federal agencies.

The Florida Republican who is Veterans Affairs' worst nightmare.  The House is recessed for the week, and most of America's representatives are in their districts meeting with constituents or campaigning — or traveling somewhere in the world on congressional business.  In this election year, when anger at Washington is boiling over, Capitol Hill is the last place any incumbent wants to be unless they absolutely have to.  But Miller isn't home in Pensacola, on the coast of Florida's Panhandle, mingling with the 1st District voters the Republican has represented since 2001.

Why There are More Scandals These Days.  [Scroll down]  Consider the latest scandal rocking Washington at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the federal government's largest civilian employer.  To meet a patient caseload that's grown 30 percent since 2003 and address persistent quality-of-care problems, the VA's budget more than doubled over the period, while full-time employees jumped 63 percent to 314,000.  Yet the VA still can't match the private sector's standard of care, which is why only 40 percent of veterans are enrolled in the government-run health care system.  A recent audit confirms a widespread and "systematic lack of integrity," as employees prioritized protecting their bonuses over caring for sick and dying veterans.

GOP: Real vets are dying in Obama's VA scandal.  On this weekend when we honor the 70th anniversary of D-Day, we are even more mindful of all we owe our veterans.  That's why what's been happening at the VA hits so close to home.  Americans are, at our core, a grateful people.  We reject the idea of letting our own people down.  To see all this deception and incompetence at the VA — with no accountability, no action:  it is more than just a shame; it's a national disgrace.

The Worst Available Care.  Liberal commentators long lauded the Veteran's Administration (VA) health-care system as a model for the nation.  New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called it a "huge policy success" and "a real live case of impressive cost control in health care."  His colleague, Nicholas Kristof, gushed that the VA health system is, "one of the best-performing and most cost-effective elements in the American medical establishment."  And Phillip Longman, in his book Best Care Anywhere, touted the VA system as "the benchmark for quality medicine in the United States."  Now, the ongoing scandal about record falsification at Veteran's Health Administration (VHA) hospitals has confirmed what most American physicians have long known — the system is irreparably broken.

Senators reach bipartisan deal on bill to fix VA.  Senators announced a sweeping bipartisan agreement Thursday to address several issues at the beleaguered Department of Veterans Affairs with hopes of approving the agreement next week and sending it to the House for swift approval.  The agreement would allow veterans who live more than 40 miles from a VA facility or who are experiencing long wait times to seek care at other government or private medical facilities.  Senators also propose providing $500 million for VA to hire more doctors and nurses to meet growing demand nationwide.

US Special Counsel Investigating Widespread Reprisal Against VA Whistle-Blowers.  The U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) is currently investigating allegations of whistleblower reprisal from 37 different Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) employees in 19 states, The Daily Caller has learned.  OSC is investigating allegations that VA retaliated against whistleblowers on cases involving "improper" health-care scheduling.  VA is currently under fire after it was revealed that a secret waiting list kept at a Phoenix, Arizona VA medical facility led to preventable veteran deaths.  A VA employee in one of the cases alleged that he/she was slapped with a proposed seven-day suspension, a lowered performance evaluation and reassignment after reporting scheduling impropriety to the VA Inspector General.

Midwest Hospitals Also Had Secret Waiting Lists.  The problems with delayed care and unauthorized wait lists that caused a furor at a Veterans Affairs health care campus in Arizona existed at several facilities in the Midwest, but in much smaller numbers, VA officials said in letters to two U.S. senators.

GOP senators unveil 'choice' plan for VA patients.  Senate Republicans on Tuesday [6/4/2014] unveiled a proposal to let veterans caught in long waiting lines go outside the VA system to get medical care, seeking to harness the private sector to help clean up some of the problems that have plagued the department.  The bill, dubbed the "Veterans Choice Act," would give veterans who live far away from a VA facility or who have waited too long for an appointment the right to see another doctor outside the VA system — but the VA would still pick up the tab, including any co-payments.

Single payer is Root Cause of VA Deaths.  General Eric Shinseki 'falling on his sword' won't bring back a single veteran who died needlessly while waiting for approved medical care.  Punishing specific hospitals or administrators won't get our veterans the timely doctor visits they need.  Blaming doesn't fix anything, and tweaking the VA system won't make things right.  The problem with the VA system is the system, a single-payer model.  Newspaper headlines shrieked outrage over unconscionable wait times to see a doctor; inadequate operating rooms; and needed medicines not available.  This should come as no surprise.  That is the way single-payer systems work.  That is the norm, not the exception.

'Do It Yourself, White Boy!' Life at the VA.  Another lifetime ago, those five words were spoken to me in a VA hospital in New Orleans.  Another typical civil service, morbidly obese nurse biding her time until retirement.  The patient was a WW1 vet (who'd been gassed, etc.) and he needed to have his bladder catheterized.  I wrote the order that was countersigned by a resident but it didn't happen.  A few hours later I returned.  I asked about it and was told,"Do it yourself, white boy!"  So I did, although I fumbled my way through the procedure since his 90-year-old prostate was the size of Delaware.  He'd been hurting for hours while this lady did her very minimal job as well as her nails.

Front-Runner To Head VA Predicts Obamacare Will Lead To Single-Payer.  The first name to emerge as the favored choice to head the Department of Veterans Affars previously predicted that Obamacare will eradicate employer-based insurance and push the U.S. towards a single-payer system "like they have in England".  The Wall Street Journal reported that Dr. Delos "Toby" Cosgrove, who heads the Cleveland Clinic, is being heavily sought by the Obama administration to replace Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was forced out last week amid the VA wait list scandal.  Cosgrove, who is a Vietnam veteran, has served as head of the clinic since 2004.

Poll: Almost 80% Hold Obama 'Personally Responsible' For VA Scandal.  A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that nearly 80% of Americans believe Barack Obama is "personally responsible" for at least some of the issues surrounding the Veterans Affairs scandal.

The VA's Two Underlying Problems.  Now that the political fight over Eric Shinseki has ended, our nation can focus on reforming the VA system, which treats about 10 million of the 22 million U.S. combat veterans and costs taxpayers about $150 billion a year.  The problem is much bigger than negligence and dereliction of duty by individual bad actors.  In fact, there are two main problems:  one cultural, the other of supply and demand.

VA Hospital Axed Veteran Programs While Approving $1 Million In Bonuses.  The Memphis Veteran Administration (VA) Medical Center approved over $1 million in bonuses months before closing a therapeutic aquatic pool citing a lack of funds.  The Memphis VA Medical Center handed out $1,005,644 in bonuses for its approximately 2,000 employees in fiscal year 2010, according to data provided to The Daily Caller by Sandra Glover, the communications officer for Veteran Integrated Services Network (VISN) 9, which includes the Memphis VA Medical Center.  Glover told TheDC that cost factored into the decision to close the therapeutic aquatic pool in July 2011.  In a statement prepared for [the Daily Caller], Glover said that bonuses and capital improvement projects come from separate pools of money, and that the VA outsources aquatic care to veterans at VA expense.

VA: Is It A Scandal Or A Prototype?  Are the problems of the Department of Veterans Affairs an unfortunate scandal? Or are they a matter of deliberate Obama administration policy? [...] Indeed, now that 60 percent of the VA's 216 major facilities have been implicated, that would seem to suggest that a good chunk of the VA's 320,000 employees are implicated.  That's bad enough.  But from an Obama point of view, that's still a manageable problem — even if the VA situation shows, as Peggy Noonan and other pundits have argued, that Obama is a bad manager, or not a manager at all.

Obama's Inverted Grief Process.  When a scandal breaks in the newspapers, the president starts with acceptance, which he mixes in with a little anger — an emotion he invariably explains "no one" is feeling more than he is.  Then his upset subsides into bargaining — that all-purpose word "if" begins this step, followed by the promise to get to the bottom of a concern that he had previously conceded was real.  And, eventually, he ends up flat-out denying that there was ever a problem in the first instance. [...] Such a pattern has now been applied to scandals involving the IRS, the NSA, the Department of Justice, and Benghazi.  But not the Veterans Administration.  Why?

President Obama's Exceptionally Productive Week.  In the midst of America grappling with the reality that veterans are safer on the battlefield than on a VA hospital waiting list, on Memorial Day, Barack Obama, lover of all things military, flew to Kabul to surprise our U.S. servicemen and women. [...] Looking spiffy in a brown bomber jacket festooned with American flags, the guy who effectively barred veterans from entering the WWII Memorial during the sequester promised the troops that their well-being was of the utmost concern: [...]

Obama Hopelessly Out of His Depth.  Over the course of the last couple of weeks, including today, I've heard Barack Obama talk about what we owe our veterans — about how what's happening to them in the VA scandal is intolerable, how reforms to the system are urgently needed, how the problems need to be fixed, and how we need to do right by our veterans across the board. [...] What I find rather odd, however, is that this critique is being offered by a man who is serving his second term as president.  It's being offered, in fact, by a man who was identifying these VA problems long before he first ran for president.  Yet they've worsened on his watch.  And he wants us to know he's mighty outraged about it.

Doctor Shortages Aren't Just a Veterans Affairs Problem. They're a Nationwide Problem.  Last week, an investigative report revealed that 1,700 veterans who wanted to see a doctor at a Phoenix Veterans Affairs hospital were missing from an official waiting list, mirroring a tactic used at two dozen other facilities across the country to mask long waits for medical care.  A few hundred other people are missing from the Veterans Affairs system, too:  doctors.  The Veterans Affairs Department is 400 doctors short, The New York Times reports.  But the doctor deficit is not limited to the VA — it's a nationwide problem.

This Chart Destroys the Claim That Insufficient Funding Caused the VA Scandal.  Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) claimed this week that more resources would solve the root causes of the massive problems at the VA.  Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) said the V.A. needs more money to effectively serve our veterans.  Joe Violante, the national legislative director for Disabled American Veterans, estimated that the V.A. has been underfunded by billions of dollars over the last decade.  Based upon these assertions, it would be plausible to assume that budget cuts at the V.A. could be partly to blame.  If funding of the V.A. has not kept up with inflation or patient growth, this would be an extremely legitimate complaint.  But that is not what has happened.

Get Rid of the VA.  If you haven't been under a rock, you've heard of the "VA scandal" and all the conservative hair lighting on fire over it.  What a surprise that the VA treats veterans like a bad afterthought and the VA bureaucracy treats themselves like kings who don't have time for the pesky, annoying vets who are always whining about waiting, and waiting, and waiting until they die.  Who knew that hasn't been happening for decades?

Why the blame-Bush effort on VA will backfire.  John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama — who reminded everyone today that he sat on the Senate Veteran Affairs Committee at the time — all criticized the Bush administration for the problems of long wait times, the lack of accountability, and the poor service provided to veterans.  McCain proposed a reform of the VA, while Obama proposed spending a lot more money and putting a lot more focus on it.  That was almost six years ago, and Obama has been in charge for more than five years, as was Eric Shinseki.

Parents of Vet Treated at Phoenix VA Facility Read His Suicide Note on Air.  CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin broke down on air Friday afternoon as the parents of Iraq War veteran Daniel Somers read his suicide letter.  Somers wrote in the note that the VA failed him.  Somers was a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and served in over 400 combat missions.  He suffered from fibromyalgia and PTSD and killed himself last year after he received treatment from the Phoenix VA hospital.

Krauthammer's Take: Shinseki Resignation was 'Elaborate Theater'.  Before Obama was president, he promised to end wait times at the VA and streamline services.  But six years later he simultaneously claims that he's been working on the problems, and that he knew nothing about the problems.

Shinseki's relatively quick ouster goes against Obama's past pattern of resisting firings.  Technically speaking, Shinseki, 71, a retired general, offered his resignation and Obama accepted it, the White House said.  But there was little question that the retired general was pushed out the door amid growing concern from Democrats about the recent disclosures of long wait times at veteran hospitals and federal employees trying to game the system to mask the problems.

VA Scandal: How a General Lost Command.  By the time Shinseki faced up to the VA's problems, the ball had already rolled past him and he couldn't get ahead of the political story or the actual events.  That's a shame, for veterans most of all.  The VA's problems didn't start with Shinseki and they won't be solved by his resignation — in fact, they may get worse.

Vets Around the Country Describe VA Experiences.  Vietnam veteran Dan Dominey has been in pain for months because, he said, the VA hospital in Phoenix delayed his care.

Obama's Dangerous Scandal At the VA.  The surprising thing isn't that Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric K. Shinseki resigned today but that he didn't do so sooner.  Like Kathleen Sebelius, he is another Obama administration appointee who simply lacked the management skills to run a large organization.  He charitably described himself as "too trusting."

Mr. Shinseki Takes the Fall.  The resignation of Secretary Eric Shinseki from the Veterans Affairs Department was probably unavoidable, under the principle that a leader should accept full responsibility for a great scandal.  But the department's problem was not Mr. Shinseki.  It has been broken for years.  No one should expect his removal to be anything but the beginning of a much-needed process of change.  Time now to tune out the noise from the lawmakers who lately have been baying for Mr. Shinseki's head.  No doubt they will keep heaping abuse on President Obama, on the campaign trail, and at the hearings for whoever is nominated as Mr. Shinseki's replacement.  Empty posturing in support of troops and veterans is a staple of political life, and is far easier than actually helping veterans.  This should not distract anyone from the long list of things that need doing at Veterans Affairs.

Scandal-hit VA secretary RESIGNS.  President Obama announced late Friday morning [5/30/2014] that he has accepted 'with considerable regret' the resignation of scandal-hit Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki.  But the shake-up had all the markings of an Oval Office firing.

The Revenge of Arithmetic.  The first thing a database developer learns to fear is data corruption.  "Data corruption refers to errors in computer data that occur during writing, reading, storage, transmission, or processing, which introduce unintended changes to the original data."  If left unchecked, data corruption eventually renders a database completely useless; not only useless, but harmful.  A useless database only fails to give you answers.  A harmful database actually gives you consistently wrong answers.  This was exactly what happened to the Veteran's Affairs, according to the Washington Post.

Decade of reports show Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki was in denial, not in the dark.  Warnings have been sounded for more than a decade that veterans were dying because of long waits for health care that were covered up by bogus record- keeping at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals.  They came in nearly two dozen reports from the agency's inspector general and the Government Accountability Office.  They came from congressional investigations and a constant barrage of reports from the Washington Examiner and other media.  They came in transition briefings when the Obama team moved into the White House in 2009.  They even came in a memorandum sent by a top VA official in 2010 to all medical network directors within the Veterans Health Administration.  Yet somehow this "bad news" escaped Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki.

Were bonuses tied to VA wait times? Here's what we know.  Two reports released this week — one by the VA's inspector general and another by the Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs — indicate in some cases wait times were manipulated to meet employee performance goals needed for bonuses.  The news has raised questions about just how widespread the practice was and who received the financial incentives.  Answers from the VA have been harder to come by.

The VA Health System Is a Tragic Warning Against Government-Run Health Care.  The report found that workers in the Phoenix VA network systematically manipulated wait time data, leaving thousands of military veterans waiting for medical appointments, and some 1,700 stuck in limbo after being left off the waiting list entirely.  According to the report, the average initial wait time for a primary care appointment in the Phoenix VA system was 115 days — a far cry from both the system's 14-day goal and the 24 days Phoenix officials had reported.

Hillary Clinton Criticized VA Care Of Veterans Under Bush.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is so far silent on allegations that hospital officials doctored paperwork to cover long wait times for veterans seeking care, but as a 2008 presidential candidate she harshly criticized the care of veterans under President Bush.  "As a President, President Bush has not done what we needed to do for our veterans," Clinton said at an El Paso, Texas campaign event in February of 2008.  "We haven't funded the VA.  We have so many coming home who are injured and not being taken care of.  I think it is the highest obligation of the President, who is also our commander in chief, to take care of those who have served our nation."  Clinton pledged as president she would take care of U.S. veterans.

The True, Awful Horror of the VA Scandal.  I don't think most Americans have fully come to terms with just how bad the Veterans Administration scandal is. [...] It's not yet clear whether [Eric Shinseki] did anything to deal with the secret wait lists or the bonuses or not.  It is clear that he promised to improve the VA's wait times for veterans, and that he failed.  But it's also clear that he is not the beginning or the end of the problem.  He came into the VA in 2009, aware that there were problems, and promising to fix them.  Problems in the VA go all the way back to before it was even called the VA.  It has never been a well-run agency, and it's fair to ask if it can ever be.

Doctor Shortage Is Cited in Delays at V.A. Hospitals.  Dr. Phyllis Hollenbeck, a primary care physician, took a job at the Veterans Affairs medical center in Jackson, Miss., in 2008 expecting fulfilling work and a lighter patient load than she had had in private practice.  What she found was quite different: 13-hour workdays fueled by large patient loads that kept growing as colleagues quit and were not replaced.

Obama needs to work with Congress to address VA scandal.  When the Obama administration's veterans scandal came to public attention last month, it was unclear just how far the administration's failure of leadership and the mistreatment of our veterans extended.  Now, we're starting to find out.  For instance, we now know that the delays and manipulation are "systemic throughout" the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), that as many as 1,700 veterans were affected in the Phoenix VA system alone, and that the scandal could extend to 42 medical facilities — a substantial increase from previous estimates.

The VA Scandal Is a Crisis of Leadership.  This scandal won't go away as others have, because all America is united in this thought:  We care about our military veterans.  We've asked a great deal of them, and they have a right to expect a great deal from us.  Also, everyone in America knows what it's like to go to a bureaucracy when you're in need and get jerked around and ignored.  The scandal also prompts this thought:  Barack Obama is killing the reputation of government.  He is killing the thing he loves through insufficient oversight.  He doesn't do the plodding, unshowy, unromantic work of making government work.  In the old political formulation, he's a show horse, not a workhorse.

Shinseki Resigns as Veterans Affairs Chief Amid Furor Over Hospitals.  Eric Shinseki resigned as secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department Friday after meeting face-to-face with President Obama about mounting evidence of widespread misconduct and mismanagement at the agency's vast network of medical facilities.  In a statement Friday morning after the meeting, Mr. Obama said that Mr. Shinseki had offered his resignation from the post he has held since the beginning of the president's administration.  "With regret, I accepted," Mr. Obama said.

Congressional Healthcare Should Be Provided by the VA.  The current situation at the Veterans Administration is a national disgrace and paints the Congress and the White House with the same filthy brush, and not just this Congress and White House but, to one degree or another, all those in recent memory.  The very idea of the people who have laid their lives on the line for the very existence of America being shunted to the side to wait around to die is despicable past the point of me having the vocabulary to express how truly incensed and nauseatingly sickened I am by the treatment of the people who should be at the very top of the priority list for the best healthcare available.  And to have a "commander in chief" who claims to have known nothing about the situation and a Congress who ignores it until there's newsprint and TV face time available to denounce it is almost beyond the belief of even someone like me who holds politicians in a position between ambulance chasers and carney shysters.

Isn't it Time Republicans Linked the VA Scandal to ObamaCare?  The VA scandal, without question, exposes the federal government's incompetence to manage anything, most especially healthcare.  In the midst of the implementation of ObamaCare, which is highly unpopular and doomed to failure, without the assistance of Republicans in Congress an argument for repeal is being made on the public stage via a VA-orchestrated debacle.  Yet, for some unknown reason, probably out of fear of politicizing a scandal involving America's vets, Republican representatives have chosen not to link this healthcare scandal to ObamaCare with the same fervor exhibited by the left when tethering mental illness to gun control, illegal immigration to racism, and extortion to fairness.

Obama: 'I Always Take Responsibility,' but VA Scandal Started with Bush.  President Obama announced the resignation of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki Friday, vowing to take full responsibility for the increasingly widespread scandal engulfing the VA's health services.  Within seconds of taking responsibility, however, the President made sure to assert that the problems "predate my presidency."

...unless you're Secretary Shinseki.
Boehner: Shinseki resignation 'really changes nothing'.  Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, said Friday that the resignation of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki does not fix widespread scheduling problems and delays in care across the VA.  "Today's announcement really changes nothing," Mr. Boehner told reporters.  "One personnel change can not be used as an excuse to paper over system problem.  Our veterans deserve better and we'll hold the president accountable until he makes things right."  President Obama announced Friday morning he had accepted Mr. Shinseki's resignation after public and political pressure to step down drew too much attention away from the real problem of helping veterans.

'Troubling' report sparks new wave of calls for VA chief's resignation.  An independent review has determined that Department of Veterans Affairs officials falsified records to hide the amount of time former service members have had to wait for medical appointments, calling a crisis that arose in one VA hospital in Phoenix a "systemic problem nationwide."  The inspector general's report, a 35-page interim document, prompted new calls for VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki, a former general  and Vietnam veteran, to resign.  Some of the calls on Capitol Hill were from members of President Obama's party, complicating what is already a political challenge for a president who has made veterans issues a legacy-defining priority after more than a decade of war.

VA investigators: Delayed care is everywhere.  Delaying medical care to veterans and manipulating records to hide those delays is "systemic throughout" the Department of Veterans Affairs health system, the VA's Office of Inspector General said in a preliminary report Wednesday.  "Our reviews at a growing number of VA medical facilities have thus far provided insight into the current extent of these inappropriate scheduling issues throughout the VA health care system and have confirmed that inappropriate scheduling practices" are widespread, the report said.  Investigators with the Inspector General's Office also said their probe into charges of delays in health care at a VA hospital in Phoenix shows that the care of patients was compromised.  Late-night testimony Wednesday [5/28/2014] by a top VA official before Congress amounted to a confession that the agency had lost its focus over the years, paying more attention to meeting performance standards than treating patients.

Republicans boil over as Veterans Affairs officials answer subpoenas with excuses and blank stares.  Sparks flew during a rare late-night hearing before the House Veterans Affairs Committee, as visibly upset Republicans raked VA officials over the coals while the ink was still wet on a scathing inspector general report condemning the agency's deadly failures.  The report found that in Phoenix, Arizona alone, 1,700 U.S. military veterans were denied medical care and others waited an average of 115 days to be seen by a doctor — and that officials covered up the lapses by manipulating wait-lists and other official records.

Severe Report Finds V.A. Hid Waiting Lists.  In the first confirmation that Department of Veterans Affairs administrators manipulated medical waiting lists at one and possibly more hospitals, the department's inspector general reported on Wednesday that 1,700 patients at the veterans medical center in Phoenix were not placed on the official waiting list for doctors' appointments and may never have received care.  The scathing report by Richard J. Griffin, the acting inspector general, validates allegations raised by whistle-blowers and others that Veterans Affairs officials in Phoenix employed artifices to cloak long waiting times for veterans seeking medical care.  Mr. Griffin said the average waiting time in Phoenix for initial primary care appointments, 115 days, was nearly five times as long as what the hospital's administrators had reported.

VA Bureaucrat: 'We Could Have Moved Forward More Quickly'.  In a testy exchange Wednesday [5/28/2014] evening, Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.), a member of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, blasted a government bureaucrat for his failure to do something about the 1,700 veterans who were waiting for primary care appointments at the Phoenix veterans hospital, but who were never placed on an electronic waiting list.  Dr. Thomas Lynch, an assistant deputy under secretary at the Department of Veterans Affairs, told the House committee Wednesday evening that he knew veterans had been left off the electronic waiting list, but he says he was more focused on understanding "the process."

Corrine Brown: No VA problems in Florida.  A stampede of Florida politicians, Republicans and Democrats, have joined the national outcry about problems at the VA. But Rep. Corrine Brown remains convinced about one thing:  "We're doing fine in Florida," she said this evening at a VA hearing, listing projects in the state.

Boehner stands by Shinseki.  Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is quickly becoming one of the only lawmakers on Capitol Hill who isn't demanding Eric Shinseki's resignation.  The Speaker on Thursday again declined to call for Shinseki to step down as secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, despite a growing chorus from both Republicans and Democrats following the release of a damaging report for the agency's inspector general.

While Vets Wait, VA Employees Do Union Work.  In 2012, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs paid at least $11.4 million to 174 nurses, mental-health specialists, therapists, and other health-care professionals who, instead of caring for veterans, worked full-time doing union business.  The list of these taxpayer-funded union representatives at VA offices around the nation and their salaries was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by Georgia representative Phil Gingrey's staff and provided to National Review Online.

Steny Hoyer: Republicans are politicizing the Veterans Affairs scandal.  The House's No. 2 Democrat accused Republicans of exploiting the scandal that has enveloped the Veterans Affairs Department for political gain and said he is worried that civil servants could be swept up unfairly in a witch hunt.  "I don't think there's any doubt about it ... that is essentially the tactic that Republicans are trying to employ," Minority Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland told reporters Wednesday [5/28/2014].

Obama and the Truth.  Smoking gun emails have been unearthed which prove the Obama administration lied about the Benghazi attacks.  This lie was repeated.  It was compounded.  It was uttered at the United Nations General Assembly.  Now the VA scandal has erupted revealing that the actors in the bureaucracy cooked the books... lied... to cover up wait times.  This is systemic conspiratorial lying.  The families of Americans who died in Benghazi deserve compassion.  The veterans and their families impacted by the Veteran's Affairs scandal deserve our compassion.  The unseen victim in the rubble is the truth.  We have, as a people, forgotten that the first duty is to the truth.

Nancy Pelosi uncertain deaths of veterans at VA qualifies as a scandal.  So far, some 23 veterans are known to have died as a result of long wait times for treatment by the Veterans Administration.  Other deaths are believed to have been caused by long wait times, but the connection between those deaths and secret waiting lists have not been officially made. [...] Nevertheless, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi dismissed those concerns in an interview with Ezra Klein.  "I think anytime our men and women in uniform are not served in the manner which they deserve could perhaps call it a scandal," she said.

Nancy Pelosi: VA Is A Scandal, Just Maybe Not A Scandal-Scandal.  House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told Vox.com's Ezra Klein that she wasn't sure the Veterans Health Administration (VA) scandal was an actual, you know scandal.  Asked by Klein for her thoughts on the VA scandal, Pelosi said (audible pauses left in), "Well, it, I .. think any time that our, our men and women in uniform are not served in the manner at which they deserve, you could perhaps call it a scandal, because it's scandalous that they're not.  Whether it is a scandal with intention and the rest of that, uh, the evidence remains to be seen.  But the fact is uh, that uh, that eh, they haven't been served worth of their sacrifice or their, uh, role in our country."

Montel Williams Goes on Fiery Rant over VA: Why Didn't Obama Apologize?!  Talk show host Montel Williams is an American veteran, and he is particularly incensed about the scandal over veteran deaths as a result of secret waiting lists.  Moreover, he was bothered by how President Obama was at West Point, yet didn't take a moment to apologize for how his administration has dropped ball on veterans' health.  Williams told Neil Cavuto that giving Secretary Shinseki the boot won't really fix much.

Inspector General Confirms Vets Waited 115 Days for Care in Phoenix.  A preliminary report Wednesday from the Veterans Affairs Department's inspector general confirmed that at least 1,700 veterans were kept off of waiting lists at the Phoenix Health Care System, leading more lawmakers on Capitol Hill to call for Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki to step down.  "While our work is not complete, we have substantiated that significant delays in access to care negatively impacted the quality of care at [the Phoenix] medical facility," acting Inspector General Robert Griffin wrote in the new report.  And the issues there are not unique.  "We are finding that inappropriate scheduling practices are a systemic problem nationwide," he wrote.

Public Unions Share the Blame For VA Deaths.  Encouraging vets on Medicare to use civilian care instead of Veterans Affairs' could cut the patient backlog at the VA by as much as half, solving a national crisis.  Almost half of vets are older than 65, and nearly all vets using the VA have Medicare coverage.  Often, they'd be better off getting their bypass surgeries and cancer operations at civilian hospitals that do higher volumes of these age-related procedures and have better survival rates, instead of sticking with the VA.  But the VA fails to tell them.  The culprit is the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that dominates the VA.  For AFGE, the VA is a jobs program.  The union wants more patients, bigger VA budgets, and more staff, never mind what ailing vets need.

More about unionized government workers.

A doctor tells the truth about the VA health care system.  The news that more than half our states have VA facilities with secret waiting lists that threaten the lives of our veterans is shocking.  But the more pervasive, less sensational, problem with VA hospitals is one I have experienced as a physician:  They are fallback places, providing second tier medical care, with each facility serving meat and potatoes medicine to its community of needy veterans.  Many veterans know this and choose to get their health care elsewhere when they can, via Medicare or private insurance if they have it.  For these veterans, the VA is a place to go for free prescriptions, lab tests and medical care only when they can't get in to see their regular doctors.

What Obama's many messes really mean.  Another week, another scandal.  From Fast and Furious at the ATF to the Pigford fraud at the Department of Agriculture, the IRS' political targeting to the State Department's Benghazi mess, the healthcare.gov debacle at HHS to spying at the NSA and the DOJ, President Obama is running out of agencies and departments to defend in his two years left in office.  This White House has either had the worst luck in recent memory or it is responsible for breaches of public trust so vast, it's no wonder public faith in our government is at a record low.

Texas VA run like a 'crime syndicate' whistleblower says.  Last week, President Obama pledged to address allegations of corruption and dangerous inefficiencies in the veterans' health-care system.  But before the president could deliver on his pledge, the scandal has spread even further.  New whistleblower testimony and internal documents implicate an award-winning VA hospital in Texas in widespread wrongdoing — and what appears to be systemic fraud.  Emails and VA memos obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast provide what is among the most comprehensive accounts yet of how high-level VA hospital employees conspired to game the system.  It shows not only how they manipulated hospital wait lists but why — to cover up the weeks and months veterans spent waiting for needed medical care.  If those lag times had been revealed, it would have threatened the executives' bonus pay.

The Fourth Branch of Government.  Preferring to look ignorant rather than irresponsible, President Obama said last week that he only recently learned of scandals at the Department of Veteran Affairs through news reports.  He spoke of the problems at the department as if they had blindsided him, despite the fact that as a candidate in 2008 he railed against the "the broken bureaucracy of the V.A." and decried outrageous delays in treatment for veterans.  He didn't need news reports to inform him of the depth of the department's flaws; he could have reviewed his own campaign speeches.

How VA Clinics Falsified Appointment Records.  Fake appointments, unofficial logs kept on the sly and appointments made without telling the patient are among tricks used to disguise delays in seeing and treating veterans at Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics.

Beaten to Death in VA Hospital, Widow Says.  After waiting for four hours for dialysis with a shunt in his arm, a veteran told a Veterans Administration hospital he was leaving, whereupon VA police beat the hell out of him and stomped on his carotid artery, giving him a stroke that killed him, and they lied to his wife about it, the widow claims in court.  Norma Montano sued the United States of America in Federal Court, for the death of her husband of 44 years, Jonathan Montano.  The Montanos' son and daughter also are plaintiffs.  The lawsuit comes as veterans hospitals nationwide are under investigation for lying about wait times to which they subjected patients.  News reports have not yet linked the long waits to any deaths.  Norma Montano does not attribute her husband's death to the long wait, but to the needless beating.

[There are] Over A Dozen House-Passed VA Reform Bills Sitting on Harry Reid's Desk.  Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-IN) interviewed with Larry O'Connor, WMAL radio in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, May 21st.  Get this:  she serves on the House Veteran's Affairs committee and says over the last 18 months, the House has passed dozens of reform bills for the VA, some bi-partisan, none of which have made it to the floor of the Senate — meaning Harry Reid killed them, didn't give Senators the opportunity to even consider them.  Can we say anything other than Harry Reid may have killed those 40 or more veterans who were not treated, and may kill more as diseases have advanced during this time?  There is only one reason not to bring legislation to the floor after it is passed and received from the House, and that is to keep the intent of the bill from happening — in this case, improving the VA.

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.

Wounded Warriors, Upset About VA, Take Memorial Day Ride.  Shortly after 8:00 a.m. Monday [5/26/2014], a group of more than 200 bicycle riders departed the Sheraton National Hotel in Arlington, Virginia for the short ride to the Naval Observatory in Northwest Washington.  The riders were in town to kick off the 7th Memorial Challenge, a week-long bike ride for wounded veterans that begins outside of Washington, D.C. and ends in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Bipartisan Lawmakers Call For Criminal Investigation Into VA Scandal.  Will Eric Holder use his highly politicized Justice Department to investigate? [...] At this point, it's [abundantly] clear that employees covered up long waits:  there's no need for an internal review.  These are established facts There's been quite a bit of waste, fraud, and abuse throughout the Veterans Affairs.  An internal review might uncover even more fraud, waste, and abuse.  What's needed is criminal investigation of what is already known.  If the VA was a private company, they'd already be under investigation by a criminal agency of the government.

The buck never stops with Obama but the credit always does.  Lots of people were surprised — and dismayed — that President Obama didn't announce the end of Eric Shinseki's tenure as secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs after the two met on Wednesday.  But pushing out Shinseki would have disturbed the narrative Obama wants Americans — and a compliant liberal mainstream media — to believe:  that the VA's inability to appropriately handle medical care for eligible veterans who need it was a longtime problem he inherited and has mostly been trying to fix.

The true VA scandal is shared across the federal government.  At the Department of Veterans Affairs, the federal government's largest employer (the Army ranks second), only 56.9 percent of employees believe they can disclose a suspected violation of law or regulation without fear of reprisal.  Even fewer — 46.1 percent — feel "a high level of respect" for their senior leaders.  Fewer still — 37 percent — are satisfied with the policies and practices of those leaders.  Quite an indictment, you may say, one that confirms congressional demands for the summary firing of Eric K. Shinseki, the Cabinet secretary in charge of the VA.  But the numbers for the government as a whole are barely more encouraging than for Mr. Shinseki's domain.

CNN: Democrats worry that Obama needs to "get a spine" in VA scandal.  It's good to know that Democrats are offended by Obama's incompetence and spineless response, too.  But if that's the case, then why is that outrage being expressed sotto voce?  Is it more important to protect Obama from criticism than it is to take action to put an end to the crisis at the VA?

Krauthammer: Chances of Democrats Learning Lesson from VA Scandal Are 'Zero'.  On Monday's [5/26/2014] broadcast of "Special Report" on the Fox News Channel, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer was not optimistic that Democrats in Washington, D.C. would learn their lesson from the Veterans Affairs hospital scandal and the fallout from it, particularly with regards to ObamaCare.

VA Fallout: Boston Globe, LA Times Declare Obama Incompetent.  The scandal at the Veteran's Administration is rocking the Obama regime and may yet be one of the worst scandals of the Obama era.  Already two major newspapers are starting to accuse the Obama administration of utter incompetence.  In fact, a lack of "competence" is exactly how columnist for the Boston Globe Jeff Jacoby put it May 25.

Vet's death highlights urology clinic wait-time issues.  All Gilford Anderson wanted was to find out exactly why his lower extremities, including his genitals, were swelling — and to ask a Phoenix Veterans Affairs doctor whether the swelling was linked to a procedure he'd received last December.  Anderson, who had prostate cancer, had been feeling sick since a stent had been implanted. Over the next five months, his body quickly deteriorated and cancer spread through his bones.  He tried to make follow-up appointments through the VA to no avail, and desperately tried other avenues like the emergency room and his sister's oncologist.

33 Democrats Opposed a Bill to Make VA Bureaucrats Easier to Fire.  On Wednesday, the House of Representative overwhelming approved the Department of Veterans Affairs Management Accountability Act, a bill that would relax the standard bureaucratic red tape that makes it exceedingly difficult to fire government employees, even those implicated in an embarrassing scandal.  The vote was not unanimous, however, as 33 Democrats for some reason voted against the legislation.  The opposition was comprised of union-backed liberals, as well as lawmakers such as Jim Moran (Va.), Steny Hoyer (Md.), and Chris Van Hollen (Md.), who represent the D.C. suburbs where many senior VA employees reside.

Nancy Pelosi blames George W. Bush for Veterans Affairs scandal.  House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., repeatedly put the blame for the Veterans Affairs scandal on former President George W. Bush, while arguing that her party has worked hard for veterans in recent years.  Pelosi took a shot at Bush while saying that the scandal is a high priority for Obama.[...] The Democratic leader never mentioned Bush by name, but she alluded to him early and often in the press briefing.

Why I Blew the Whistle on the V.A..  My decision to become a whistle-blower after 24 years as a physician in a Veterans Affairs hospital was, at first, an easy one.  I knew about patients who were dying while waiting for appointments on the V.A.'s secret schedules, and I couldn't stay silent.  But there was no response to the two letters I sent to the Veterans Affairs inspector general, one in late October 2013 and one in early February.  Going public would damage an institution I gave more than two decades of my life to, trying to make a better place for veterans to get their care.  But I had to be able to sleep at night.

Resign.  In the Czech Republic, the entire government stepped down over a relatively picayune corruption scandal in which politicians bought off potential opponents with government jobs; in Turkey, senior ministers resigned after a similar scandal, though the prime minister resisted calls for his resignation; the prime minister of Luxembourg, Europe's longest-serving leader, announced his resignation when it was revealed that his spy agencies were misbehaving; the governor of Tokyo stepped down over a dodgy loan from a hospital operator; etc.  These are premiers and heads of parliamentary governments and senior leaders; what's an obscure cabinet secretary by comparison?

Obama's Vapid Response to the VA Scandal.  It's been a month since we learned up to 40 of more than 1,400 veterans on a secret waiting list at the VA hospital in Phoenix may have died while waiting up to a year for treatment. [...] It wasn't until Wednesday that President Barack Obama spoke in public about the scandal.  He'd learned of it from news reports, said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.  That's also how the president learned the Obamacare website was a mess, the IRS was targeting conservative groups and security at the Benghazi consulate was lax, aides said.  Evidently no one who works for Mr. Obama ever tells him anything.

Veterans groups blast Obama's remarks on VA scandal: 'Tremendous disappointment'.  Two top veterans groups — the American Legion and the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) — voiced their displeasure Wednesday with President Obama's remarks on the growing VA scandal.  The American Legion said in a statement that the president's decision not to announce the firing of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki was "an unfortunate one," while Paul Rieckhoff, the CEO and founder of IAVA, called Mr. Obama's response "a tremendous disappointment," the Hill reported.

Fournier: Obama's VA Presser 'Pathetic'.  National Journal's Ron Fournier had sharp criticism for President Obama over his handling of the Virginia Veterans scandal.  Fournier called the Obama Administration's view on scandal "pathetic" and said Obama knew the scandal "was a systemic problem" when he came into office.  "He is winding down the wars and he knew this had to be a radical overhaul and what did he do, like he's done with a lot of other things?" he asked.  "He didn't pay attention, he didn't govern.  Now he's holding nobody accountable," he continued.

Obama's Predictable Response to VA Problems.  Follow the Veterans Administration scandal timeline and you'll recognize how it parallels events in other Obama scandals.

Obama transition team was told about 3 audits showing VA misreported wait times.  President Obama's transition team was warned in 2008 that repeated audits showed the Veterans Affairs Department was misreporting wait times for medical treatment, including one audit revealing delays nearly 10 times worse than the department was officially acknowledging.  The situation was so bad that the inspector general said it stopped trying to police the issue until the VA could prove its information was accurate — raising a red flag for the transition team, according to documents obtained by The Washington Times.

Ben Carson: VA Mess Predicts Even Worse Outcome for Obamacare.  Retired pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson on Saturday called the Veterans Administration scandal a "gift from God" because it portends the future of healthcare in America under Obamacare.  "I think what's happening with the veterans is a gift from God to show us what happens when you take layers and layers of bureaucracy and place them between the patients and the healthcare provider," Carson told Fox News.

... and it still is.
Liberals once touted VA as a model of socialized medicine.  It should go without saying that you could never get away with what the VA is doing in the private sector.  In fact, the incentives would work to cut wait times and improve care rather than cover up deficiencies.  In short, gas bags like Krugman and Klein don't know what they're talking about.  Or, they simply believe in fairy tales about socialism's promises.  They obviously haven't looked very closely at the disaster in Great Britain as the NIH kills thousands every year with long wait times for appointments, filthy hospitals, and shortages of all kinds.

Obama gins up his outrage act over VA scandal.  President Barack Obama is fed up — again.  He's outraged over his latest scandal involving lethal delays providing promised medical care to American veterans — again.  Because, Obama claims, he didn't know about it — again.  And he's vowing to get to the bottom of the problem — again.  And hold all those accountable — again. [...] ["]So if these allegations prove to be true, it is dishonorable, it is disgraceful, and I will not tolerate it.  Period!"  Oh-oh.  There's Obama's telltale punctuation point — "Period!"  That's become a guaranteed laugh-line since its frequent use in his ObamaCare "you can keep your doctor" lies.

Miami VA hospital employee alleges crimes ignored.  As a crisis engulfs the Department of Veterans Affairs over allegations of wrongdoing at VA medical centers across the country, Miami's VA Hospital has come under fire from one of its own: a longtime employee and police detective, who alleges that some patients are dealing drugs, others are being physically abused — and administrators are covering up the problems. [...] In allegations first reported by WFOR-CBS 4 this week, Fiore said that instead of being allowed to investigate these incidents as a VA detective, he was re-assigned to a clerical position within the hospital's medical administration department as retaliation.

Senate Dems close ranks on VA.  Senate Democrats are closing ranks behind Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki and President Obama's decision to keep him in the Cabinet despite Republican calls for his ouster.  As of Thursday afternoon, not a single Democratic senator had called for Shinseki's resignation.

Is the VA scandal a funding issue, or a leadership failure?  Over the last few days, some have suggested that the issue at the VA has been a lack of resources, by which the US has shortchanged the VA in budgets and in patient spending.  While one can argue whether resources within the VA have been adequately focused — which is a leadership issue — one cannot argue that the VA has lacked for resources from Congress in the form of budgets or per-patient spending.  OMB historical data on budget outlays by department are easily available at the White House website, and the spreadsheet tells a very interesting story.

The Veterans Scandal: Socialized Medicine on Trial.  Barack Obama's [...] lifetime dream of a free public (single payer) healthcare system for all just disintegrated in front of him.  Forget the wildly ambitious and pervasive "Affordable Care Act," the government couldn't even handle the health of our wounded servicemen, acknowledged for years to be by far the group most deserving of medical attention in our country.  With veterans dying while waiting lists are falsified, it's hard to see government healthcare as anything but incompetent, disgraceful and quite possibly criminal.

Socialism Emerges as Culprit In Scandal of Veterans' Care.  The Veterans Affairs health-care system is completely government run.  It is a pure single-payer program.  National Review editor Rich Lowry calls it "an island of socialism in American health care."  He is right. [...] The long waits for treatment, with excessive delays resulting in as many as 40 deaths, are a tragically predictable outcome.  This is the result of bureaucratic rationing, price controls, inefficiencies, and the inevitable cover-ups.

Loose Drugs and Manslaughter at the Veterans Administration.  The Washington Times reported that the administration, in 2008, was apprised as a general matter of VA problems related to wait times.  According to the Times, concealed wait times are what led to the resignation of Undersecretary of Health Robert A. Petzel.  Maybe so, but there is also evidence that Petzel — since he presumably had access to VA inspector general reports — knew about loose drugs at the VA and did nothing about it.

The VA Scandal in Brief: Yes, It's Bad.  The scheme to cover up long waits at VA hospitals worked like this:  The local VA administrators in numerous VA hospitals would not officially book an appointment — however direly needed — until an opening in a doctor's schedule came up, essentially keeping a waiting list to get onto the official waiting list.  In other instances, the politicians in charge of the facilities would constantly cancel and reschedule appointments in order to make it appear that the overwhelming majority of appointments were made within the VA's stated goal of a 14-day window.

Obama Admin Has Already Ignored 3 IG Reports on VA Problems.  In the opening of The Kelly File [5/23/2014], Megyn took us through the Obama administration's mishandling of problems within the VA going back to 2008.  After the president said he would await an Inspector General's report before fully weighing in on possible abuses within the VA, we're learning that three IG reports and an audit have already been completed.

Dem Congressman Blasts Obama Administration for Lying About the VA.  Democratic Congressman David Scott (GA) took to the House floor on Wednesday to deliver a scathing message to the Obama Administration.  He called for the firing of Veteran's Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki, and said that VA officials had been lying to Congressmen over the state of the department.  Scott delivered an impassioned speech when discussing how 40 veterans died when they could not get help.

Louisiana VA staff falsified documents.  Twenty-three employees at a Department of Veterans Affairs center in Louisiana were placed on leave in 2010 as part of an investigation into document forgeries, a move revealed only in federal whistleblower lawsuits filed years later.  The investigation focused on records required to prove staff "competencies" at a medical facility in Shreveport, Louisiana, according to the complaints.  Nancy Faulk, an associate chief nurse at a VA hospital in Shreveport, filed a lawsuit last fall disclosing that employees "were identified as participating in the falsification of competency records."

The VA scandal will stick with the Obama administration.  [Scroll down]  The incompetence comes in the aftermath of HealthCare.gov — the Technicolor failure of technocratic liberalism.  Again, the White House is shocked, saddened and angered by the management fiasco of a manager under its direct control.  In both cases, a presidential priority was badly mishandled over a period of years, and the president seems to have learned about it on cable news.  Obama has defended himself by assuming the role of an outraged bystander — which, when it comes to leadership, is more of a self-indictment than a defense.

In a Month, TV News Gives Less Airtime to VA Scandal Than Christie Controversy Received in Four Days.  In nearly four and a half weeks, the ABC, CBS and NBC morning and evening news shows have offered 110 minutes to an evolving Obama administration scandal involving secret lists designed to keep veterans from receiving proper medical treatment.  Back in January, it took those same network shows just four and a half days to churn that much coverage for Chris Christie's Bridgegate.

Shinseki at The VA — Wrong Man, Wrong Reason.  Clashing with the Bush administration over anything was enough to recommend Shinseki to the Obama administration.  Unfortunately, as the nation has seen to the detriment of its wounded warriors, it hardly qualifies one to be Secretary of Veterans Affairs.  Obama was looking for an anti-Bush icon with General's stripes when he should have been looking for a competent administrator.

Democrats introduce exciting new meme to celebrate Obama doing nothing to fix the VA.  What am I missing here?  There must be some inside joke or allusion I'm not getting that explains why you'd introduce this slogan during the one week more than any other of his presidency that illustrates what a terrible, disengaged manager he is.

How America Treats Illegal Aliens vs. Veterans.  A government that fails to secure its borders is guilty of dereliction of duty.  A government that fails to care for our men and women on the frontlines is guilty of malpractice.  A government that puts the needs of illegal aliens above U.S. veterans for political gain should be prosecuted for criminal neglect bordering on treason.

Obama Let the VA Scandal Become a Political Circus.  President Obama sounded resolute Wednesday addressing the secret waiting lists at VA hospitals, until you noticed the caveats that hung off nearly every line.  It was the first time the president addressed the VA scandal and it came almost a month after the story broke.  But the speech was more detailed than anything that had yet come from the White House and sounded all the more forceful coming after VA Secretary Shinseki's tepid appearance before Congress last week.  Had this speech come two weeks — or even 10 days — ago, it might have been taken in good faith as a signal that real accountability was coming in short order.  But for many, that moment has passed.

'Al Qaeda terrorists at Guantanamo treated better than our vets,' claims former Defense Department spokesman.  A former Defense Department spokesman is calling out the Obama administration for giving terrorists better medical treatment than its giving the nation's veterans.  In an opinion piece on FoxNews.com today, Defense Department alumni J.D. Gordon claims, 'Al Qaeda terrorists at Guantanamo treated better than our vets.'  'Yes, it's true.  I know because I served as a Pentagon spokesman from 2005-2009 and visited Guantanamo Bay Naval Base over 30 times during those years,' he writes.

Flashback: Democrats Argue VA's Success is Proof Obamacare Will Work.  The bureaucratic corruption and abuses now coming to light ought to serve as stark warnings against expanding single-payer healthcare in America.  If government apparatchiks can fail our combat veterans this badly — in a limited-scope, government-run program that virtually all Americans support — what possible justification is there for foisting this failing model onto the entire country?

Report: $8.8 million in taxpayer-funded bonuses at seven accused VA facilities since 2011.  Open the Books — a good government and transparency-minded watchdog organization — does exactly what their name implies, and discovers that taxpayers showered officials at seven embattled VA locations with nearly $9 million in bonus pay between 2011 and 2013.

The Obama Administration's Ethics Problem.  Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki cannot get a handle on the recent scandalous treatment of veterans in VA hospitals, where more than 40 sick men were allowed to die without proper follow-up treatment.  A cover-up allegedly followed.  When the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal broke under the George W. Bush administration, heads rolled.  So far, Shinseki seems immune from similar accountability.

The VA scandal's lesson for ObamaCare.  The truth is these hospitals are a mess and have been under both Republican and Democratic administrations.  In the George W. Bush years, we had a scandal over the filthy conditions at Walter Reed.  In the Clinton years, The Washington Post ran a story headlined "VA Hospitals Report Thousands of Errors, Many Causing Death."  Previous administrations had their own share of VA scandals.  The real problem is not management.  The real problem is government-provided health care.

Why the VA Scandal Is the Real Outrage.  If you've ever been seriously sick or helped a family member who is, you know how dark it can get.  In the hospital, you look to every doctor or nurse who throws back that curtain and punches the hand sanitizer machine as if they have the answer, but they don't.  This test or that test will tell us more, you're told, or we'll know more after one more bag is hooked up and drained. [...] Now imagine if you experienced it with the inefficiency of the worst experience you've ever had with customer service.  That's what's happening in some cases at Veteran Affairs clinics and hospitals around the country:  People at their most acute moments of need are being ignored and forgotten.

VA Has Already Admitted 23 Veteran Deaths Linked to Delays in Care.  At a press conference Wednesday [5/21/2014], President Obama said that the inspector general for the VA "did not see a link" between veteran deaths and delays in care at VA hospitals.  The president suggested that he can't take action until investigators "find out what exactly happened": [...] It's true that the inspector general has not yet attributed deaths at the Phoenix VA to delays in care, but a VA internal review found a link between the deaths of 23 veterans and wait times at VA facilities.

The VA's Socialist Paradise.  For the left, the Department of Veterans Affairs is how health care is ideally supposed to work.  No insurance companies, no private doctors, no competition — just the government and the patient.  Paul Krugman, The New York Times columnist, has held up the VA as a model for the entire country.  The Washington Monthly ran a famous article in 2005 arguing that the VA was leading the way for U.S. health care.  The socialist senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, is such a reflexive defender that in an instantly notorious interview on CNN he pooh-poohed the burgeoning scandal that may involve fatalities with the undeniable observation that "people die every day."

Palin Calls Out 'Lazy' Obama for Lack of Accountability.  On Fox News Channel's Thursday broadcast of "Hannity," former Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) reacted to President Barack Obama's handling of the ever-expanding VA Hospital scandal.  Host Sean Hannity indicated this seemed to be a pattern and pointed to the lack of a standard of accountability in the Obama administration, which included Attorney General Eric Holder, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and now Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki.

Kirk questions $16.6 million in bonuses at Hines VA.  Writing a top VA official this week, Sen. Mark Kirk said $16.6 million in bonuses have been awarded at the Edward Hines Jr. VA Hospital west of Chicago since 2011 and asked whether waiting times for patients had been manipulated there so criteria for the bonuses could be met.  Kirk's letter to Richard Griffin, acting inspector general of the Department of Veterans Affairs, cited Freedom of Information Act requests as the source of the information about the bonuses.

GOP Rep. Gohmert Compares Boehner to VA Head: 'Time for New Leadership'.  Will John Boehner's House Speakership be able to survive the 2014 midterm elections?  Even if Republicans retain control control [sic] of the chamber, one member of the Boehner's is fairly certain the answer is "no."

House passes bill to allow VA chief to more easily fire workers.  The House easily passed legislation Wednesday [5/21/2014] that would make it easier for the Veterans Affairs secretary to fire or demote senior employees, a proposal that gained support after allegations of mismanagement at the agency.  The VA Management Accountability Act was first introduced before the recent firestorm over reports that VA medical facilities concealed long waits for healthcare.  But the recent developments led House leaders to accelerate its consideration.

The Editor asks...
Why just the VA?  Why not make every government employee accountable for his or her actions?  Here is the answer:  unions want absolute job security no matter what.

MSNBC Panel Admits VA Scandal A 'Political Problem' for Obama, 'Confidence is Lost'.  During a panel discussion on her 12 p.m. ET hour MSNBC show on Wednesday [5/21/2014], host Andrea Mitchell wondered why President Obama chose to make a statement on the Veteran's Affairs scandal without having any significant reforms to announce:  "Why send the President out to say something about the VA when he's not ready to take bolder action?"  Chief White House correspondent and political director Chuck Todd acknowledged:  "Well, this was an attempt, I think, to stop the political bleeding that was taking place... that this has become a political problem for the White House. [...]"

Director of scandal-hit VA hospital in Phoenix got $8,500 bonus in April.  The director of the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care System received an $8,500 performance bonus in April while the agency's inspector general investigated the deaths of 40 veterans there due to mismanaged waiting lists.  Sharon Helman also got a $9,345 bonus in 2013.  A red-faced VA was forced to rescind the bonuses on Wednesday [5/21/2014] after a member of Congress blew the whistle on national television.  As the scandal deepens, two Democrats have broken a partisan logjam by demanding the resignation of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki.

Obama Talks VA Scandal: Vets Are 'One of the Causes of My Presidency'.  On Wednesday [5/21/2014], President Barack Obama spoke with members of the press after meeting with his staff on how they plan to address the scandal involving the hiding of wait times veterans faced at VA hospitals.  The president expressed his anger over that situation, but he urged the public to wait for a full investigation before taking steps to address the problems at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Miami VA Whistleblower Exposes Drug Dealing, Theft, Abuse.  When asked why he would risk his job and speak publicly, Detective Thomas Fiore considered the question carefully before answering.  "People are dying," he finally said, "and there are so many things that are going on there that people need to know about."  Fiore, a criminal investigator for the VA police department in South Florida, contacted CBS4 News hoping to shed light on what he considers a culture of cover-ups and bureaucratic neglect.  Among his charges:  Drug dealing on the hospital grounds is a daily occurrence.

This memo shows that the VA knew of records manipulation in 2010.  Robert Petzel resigned last week as the top health official for the Department of Veterans Affairs, just one day after testifying before a Senate committee that he knew VA health clinics were using inappropriate scheduling practices as early as 2010.  Whistleblowers claim the schemes continued until this year, leading to a recent wave of outrage that sent the VA and White House scrambling to correct the alleged problems and restore confidence in the department.

Obama campaigned on the backs of waiting-list veteran heroes in 2008.  President Barack Obama did not, as the White House claimed yesterday, only learn of the VA wait-list scandal on TV, just as he claimed to learn of the IRS, Fast and Furious and AP reporting snooping scandals.  Obama campaigned on the VA scandal while still a senator in 2008, got elected president and then forgot about it — until the scandal came back into the light of publicity this month.

O'Reilly: Obama 'At the Tipping Point,' 'Gives Power to Incompetent People'.  ["]President Obama is at the tipping point.  It is one thing after another with his administration.  The head of the VA, Gen. Eric Shinseki should be fired immediately it is lunacy to have Shinseki, who is overseeing the VA debacle investigate anything — lunacy.  He is not competent to run a federal agency.  He has got to go.  Just like the soon-to-depart Kathleen Sebelius was not competent to roll out ObamaCare.  Again, the truth, the truth is that the president gives power to incompetent people and keeps them in place when things fall apart.["]

We are all veterans now.  The national scandal and disgrace at the VA (Department of Veterans Affairs) is the perfect example of the disaster that awaits America with ObamaCare.  We're about to find out what it's like to receive health care from the government.  The VA scandal is proof that with government in charge of health care, it will bankrupt the entire country.  Countless Americans will die through bureaucratic incompetence, neglect, long waiting lists and fraud.  Just like what our veterans have already experienced.

Conflicting accounts of when Obama learned of VA problems.  With criticism and anger mounting on both sides of the aisle, the White House on Tuesday [5/20/2014] struggled to explain exactly when President Obama learned of lengthy wait times and false reporting at Veterans Affairs health care facilities but defended its larger effort to improve care for the nation's veterans.  A day after claiming the president learned from TV news reports of accusations that as many as 40 veterans died while waiting for treatment at a Phoenix VA hospital, White House press secretary Jay Carney said the burgeoning scandal is "not a new issue" to Mr. Obama.

More VA Whistleblowers Coming Forward.  What the whistleblowers can expect is a hostile media that has surrounded their Precious to come after them.  Used to be a time in this country when whistleblowers were lauded and had movies made about them.  Those days ended January 20, 2009.

VA Whistleblower Says He's Been Demoted, Bullied.  Dr. Jose Mathews says he's paying the price for being a whistle-blower at the VA hospital in St. Louis.  He didn't hold back as he told his story to KMOX.  Mathews was head of psychiatry at the VA before he came forward to say that doctors were treating only half the mental health patients they had the capacity to handle.  After, he says he was promptly removed from his position and specifically instructed not to contact any of the psychiatrists he was leading.

White House flails on VA mess.  At first, last week's dismissal of a high-ranking official with the Dickensian name of Dr. Robert Petzel seemed like the least the administration could've done to respond to the cover-up of the lax, lazy and downright inhuman treatment provided to veterans at the government-run hospitals across the country — hospitals specifically and solely dedicated to their care.  The supposed firing came a day after a disastrous congressional hearing featuring Petzel and Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki.  But almost immediately, it turned out Petzel wasn't dismissed at all; he'd announced his retirement months earlier and was only staying on until his successor was confirmed.

When a President Learns Everything on TV.  [H]aving an absentee president is bad for both the health of veterans and the nation.  The president may have gotten away with treating the IRS scandal as no big deal and questions about Benghazi as merely a Republican witch hunt.  But the spectacle of widespread corruption at the heart of a government health-care system that led to the deaths of veterans is not one you can pass off as a product of the fevered imaginations of his opponents.  That's especially true when you consider that Rep. Jeff Miller, the chair of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, wrote specifically to the president a year ago to bring to his attention what was already believed to be a widespread problem involving inefficiency and deceptive practices.

VA Spending Per Patient Exploded Amid Deadly Delays.  Several VA hospitals have been accused of falsifying records to cover up delays in treating patients in desperate need.  In Phoenix, as many as 40 veterans may have died as a result.  Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., argued that the main cause of the delays is money:  "If the VA does not have enough doctors to see these patients, then these problems are a result of a lack of funding." [...] It sounds good.  And it would seem to make sense.  But it's far from true.  The VA's budget has been exploding, even as the number of veterans steadily declines.  From 2000 to 2013, outlays nearly tripled, while the population of veterans declined by 4.3 million.  Medical care spending — which consumes about 40% of the VA's budget — has climbed 193% over those years, while the number of patients served by the VA each year went up just 68%, according to data from the VA.

Why VA hospital scandal is hurting the administration's credibility.  Whatever the anger index, the administration hasn't done much to fix the problems created by secret lists to hide the long waiting times for veterans to get medical care, including the possibility that some patient deaths in Phoenix could have been avoided.  The department's undersecretary for health resigned Friday, three Phoenix officials have been put on leave, and that's about it.  The story is increasingly gaining traction in the press.

The Editor says...
The administration's credibility was already shot.

The VA and the Limits of Liberalism.  Many have noted, including our own John Fund, that the VA scandal poses an acute threat to the Obama administration because of how much its problems resemble the criticisms of Obamacare itself.  But let's imagine there was no Obamacare.  Let's imagine that Obama had actually followed through on his occasional promises to focus on the economy and jobs first and foremost and didn't blunder into the huge wasteful distraction that is the Affordable Care Act.  The lessons of the VA would still be a problem for Obama and for liberals generally.  Why?  Because the Democratic party simply is the party of government.  It is the party that insists on the nobility, efficacy and intellectual superiority of government.

The Scandal at the VA Is Real, and Obama Is Ducking It.  What is most surprising about the present controversy surrounding the substandard treatment at the VA, in which at least 40 veterans lost their lives while awaiting treatment, is that House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller (R-FL) had alerted the president to trouble nearly a year ago.

Obama's Silence Amid VA Crisis Raises the Stakes for Democrats.  It's rare, in the epicenter of partisan national politics, for a scandal implicating one of the political parties to unfold in slow motion. But that's what has happened in Washington since charges of misconduct at the Department of Veterans Affairs were raised last month.  That may explain the White House's somewhat muted response  — President Barack Obama hasn't publicly addressed the issue since April 28, when he was asked about it during a trip to Asia.

Heads Need to Roll at the VA.  If VA hospitals really are falsifying records to disguise lengthy waiting times — and if veterans are dying as a consequence — then President Obama needs to bring in new management to fix the problems, and fast.

Obama Faces New Test in Mismanagement at Veterans Hospitals.  The president is now facing fresh allegations that officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs manipulated wait times to hide the long delays many patients faced to see physicians.  Aides said he learned of the specific allegations in news reports.  Mr. Obama's apparent lack of awareness about the current problems at the department has drawn the expected scorn from across the political spectrum, and will probably increase this week as lawmakers return to Capitol Hill.

Why Hasn't Obama Addressed the VA Scandal Since Last Month?  Evidence of the barbaric treatment of America's retired armed forces personnel in the Veterans Health Administration system grows by the hour.  Atop word last month that 40 vets died awaiting care in Phoenix, Sunday's [5/18/2014] Dayton Daily News, reported that "The number of dead veterans could total more than 1,100 from 2001 through the first half of 2013" due to faulty treatment and waiting endless months for VA medical care.

Obama routinely shocked, angered by things happening within his own administration.  The media swears that this is the scandal, finally, that will really hurt the administration.  They're all over it.  But they were "all over" previous scandals, too, before they lost interest and eventually started playing defense for the administration.  Will (at least) dozens of dead veterans hold the press' attention long enough to leave a lasting mark?  We'll see, but in the meantime, please excuse my skepticism.

The Obvious Lessons of the VA Scandal.  My father was a veteran of World War II, and thus eligible to receive medical treatment at the VA hospital that operated a few miles from our house.  He used it exactly once.  His experience with what the Veterans Administration calls "health care" was so awful that he claimed to be more in fear of his life within the walls of that VA facility than he had ever been while on active duty in Europe.

VA Scandal Compounds Democrats' Obamacare Problem.  Both Republicans and Democrats have praised the VA system as a model of efficient health care delivery.  It is now clear that such praise should have been offered cautiously, if at all.  For all the hand-wringing, lip service, and declarations that "nobody is more outraged about this," however, 2014 finally offers politicians a window to do something about the problems at the VA.  Why?  It's an election year, and the Affordable Care Act is on the ballot.

More VA Whistleblowers Coming Forward, Campaign Says.  Conscientious workers at the Veterans Health Administration aware of their employer's reputation for punishing people who expose wrongdoing were given a new outlet last week.  The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) and the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America unveiled an encrypted web submission form Thursday soliciting horror stories in the wake of a nationwide furor about fudged wait time records and related veteran deaths in Phoenix.  POGO Director of Communications Joe Newman says the groups are looking for systematic problems and received 310 submissions as of Monday morning.

Obama can't duck responsibility for the VA scandal.  Little attention was paid back in 2012 when the Washington Examiner's Mark Flatten first began shining the spotlight on the multitude of management and ethical problems in the day-to-day operations of VA.  But people within VA had long been pointing to serious problems, including a 2010 memo to the department's topmost leadership describing eight ways waiting-times data was being manipulated by VA facilities managers.  Even the Obama transition team at VA took note of the problems in its 2008 report, according to the Washington Times.  So Obama knew of these problems from before he took the oath of office, as Shinseki surely did when he first took over at VA.  The department's most serious maladies have worsened under Obama and Shinseki.

ABC, NBC Ignore Report Showing Obama Administration Knew About Ongoing VA Problems.  Of the big three networks, only the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley covered the new revelations in the VA scandal.  CBS News host Scott Pelley noted that "The Bush White House was so concerned about this back in 2008 that it warned the incoming Obama Administration."  CBS Evening News and Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier were the only evening news programs to cover the report while NBC Nightly News and ABC World News remained silent.

White House says Obama only learned of VA wait-list scandal on TV.  White House Press Secretary Jay Carney wound up with egg on his face Monday as he told reporters that President Barack Obama first learned from a TV news report that his Veterans Administration was denying medical care to vets with secret off-the-books-waiting lists.  But new evidence emerged this morning that his transition team was notified five years ago about how VA medical centers' official wait-list times bore little resemblance to reality and risked denying military heroes critical health care.

Jay Carney: Obama First Learned About VA Scandal in the Media.  President Barack Obama first learned of the scandal involving Department of Veterans Affairs hospital administrators concealing the true wait times vets faced in the press, according to a claim made by White House Press Sec. Jay Carney on Monday [5/19/2014].  While the president may have not been aware of the falsified wait lists, however, reports indicate that his administration was informed of excessive wait times at the VA as early as 2008.  Obama even campaigned on the issue of VA waiting lists in 2007.

V.A. paid out millions to settle 167 cases of delayed medical treatment: report.  The Department of Veterans Affairs paid a combined $36.4 million to settle at least 167 cases related to delays in medical treatment, a new report alleges.  The embattled agency — which has been criticized in recent months for a failure to treat veterans promptly — made the payments since 2001 either voluntarily or as the result of court actions, the Dayton Daily News reported Sunday [5/18/2014], citing record obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.  News of the settlement comes after reports emerged last month linking the death of at least 40 veterans to lengthy waits and shoddy care at a Phoenix, V.A. hospital.  V.A. officials are also accused of trying to cover up the alleged improprieties.

VA Scandal Hits New Hospital.  Add Albuquerque, New Mexico's to the growing list of VA hospitals accused of keeping secret waiting lists to hide delays for veterans seeking medical care.  And it may already be too late to get to the truth and find out what harm, if any, was done to veterans there — VA officials are already destroying records to cover their tracks, a whistleblower inside the hospital tells The Daily Beast.

Obama furious over treatment delays at VA hospitals blamed for 40 deaths as health official is forced to resign.  Top aide Denis McDonough tells CBS' Face the Nation [5/18/2014] that Obama is demanding that Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki and others in the administration 'continue to fix these things until they're functioning the way that our veterans believe they should.'  Allegations of preventable deaths that may be linked to delays at the Phoenix VA hospital have triggered an election-year uproar.

Obama warned about VA wait-time problems during 2008 transition.  The Obama administration received clear notice more than five years ago that VA medical facilities were reporting inaccurate waiting times and experiencing scheduling failures that threatened to deny veterans timely health care — problems that have turned into a growing scandal.  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.

'Delay in treatment' a factor in more than 100 deaths at VA centers.  As controversy swirls around the Veterans Administration over deaths caused by delayed care, an investigation by the Dayton Daily News found that the VA settled many cases that appear to be related to delays in treatment.  A database of paid claims by the VA since 2001 includes 167 in which the words "delay in treatment" is used in the description.  The VA paid out a total of $36.4 million to settle those claims, either voluntarily or as part of a court action.  The VA has admitted that 23 people have died because of delayed care, and is facing accusations that hospital administrators are gaming the system to conceal wait times, including using a "secret list" at the VA in Phoenix.

Whistleblower alleges VA clinic is destroying evidence.  A whistleblower is alleging that a Veterans Affairs clinic in Albuquerque, N.M., is destroying evidence of a secret waiting list for veterans seeking care.  "The 'secret wait list' for patient appointments is being either moved or was destroyed after what happened in Phoenix," a doctor who works at the Albuquerque VA hospital told The Daily Beast.  "Right now ... there is an eight-month waiting list for patients to get ultrasounds of their hearts.  Some patients have died before they got their studies.  It is unknown why they died, some for cardiac reasons, some for other reasons," the doctor said.  Among the veterans on the waiting list were veterans with serious heart conditions, gangrene and even brain tumors, the doctor alleged.

Obama 'madder than hell' over VA scandal.  In some ways, this scandal is more dangerous to the president than any other. There are documents, witnesses willing to tell their story, and both parties eager to get to the bottom of what happened.  It's safe to assume that more revelations of wrongdoing will be forthcoming.  It probably won't lead to impeachment, but it will severely damage Obama's reputation.  It plays into the narrative that Obama is incompetent and that people are suffering — and dying — because of it.  That's a powerful message to go into mid terms with.

Veterans Affairs Undersecretary Robert Petzl didn't resign, but was FORCED OUT by Obama administration.  A White House official said Friday [5/16/2014] that the resignation of Veterans Affairs Undersecretary Robert Petzl was not voluntary, despite previous reports that he resigned out of anger with the Obama Administration. [...] Petzel, the undersecretary for health care at the VA, resigned abruptly on Friday, just a day after telling a U.S. Senate committee that he knew in 2010 about a memo describing 'inappropriate scheduling practices' now blamed for as many as 40 deaths at VA medical centers.

Vets Using Phoenix VA are Angry, Sick and Scared.  The veterans who use the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health System are angry, sick and scared.  They say they call and call, but get no answer.  They say they are ignored, disrespected and turned away by employees with no medical training.  They say they wait months for an appointment with a primary care doctor, then wait several more months to see a specialist.  More than 200 veterans and family members packed into American Legion Post 41 to share horror stories of delays, misdiagnoses and poor treatment with the national commander of the American Legion and the interim director of the Phoenix VA.

How VA hospitals are a government-run disaster.  Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has long touted the VA system as the epitome of government-run healthcare.  "Exhibit A for the advantages of government provision [of healthcare] is the veterans administration, which runs its own hospitals and clinics, and provides some of the best-quality healthcare in America at far lower cost than the private sector," Krugman claims.  And he is right ... at least about the VA being exhibit A for government healthcare.  Like all single-payer health systems around the world, the VA controls costs by imposing a "global budget" — a limit to how much it can spend on care. [...] When resources can't meet demand in a given year, the VA does what other single-payer systems do:  It rations.

Can't stop the music.  The Financial Times actually believes that a Veteran's Administration scandal may taint president Obama in a way that Benghazi, IRS, the AP wiretapping scandal, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Libya, NSA, Ukraine and Obamacare could not.  In an article filled with outrage the writer thinks, this time it sticks.  Why should it?

With Dems, WH in CYA mode, VA scandal potentially bigger than IRS, Benghazi.  The Veterans Administration scandal may drive this coming election cycle in ways no one has yet anticipated.  Given the deep reverence for veterans that exists in Americans of all political stripes and Democrats' already-precarious electoral position ahead of the 2014 midterm, the media's best and brightest seem to be concluding that this could tip the balance something fierce.  This CNN segment demonstrates the power of this issue.  When bureaucrats cause dozens of veterans to die, and the White House goes into CYA mode, the issue is just too powerful for anyone to write it off as a partisan witch hunt.

VA Scandals Raise The Specter Of Healthcare Rationing.  Whistleblowers within the Veterans' Administration health system are coming forward with tales of brutal disregard for the health and life of those who served our country.  Allegations of extensive wait times for lifesaving care, deaths while waiting, and horrific mismanagement have triggered outrage.  Unfortunately, the VA abuses are just the tip of a much larger, more menacing iceberg.  The iceberg is covert health care rationing, and it's inherent in single-payer systems like the VA.

VA Fast-Tracks Sex Change for Manning While Vets Die on Waiting Lists.  Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has formally approved the request of Pvt. Bradley Manning, convicted for leaking classified documents to Wikileaks, to be temporarily transferred out of military custody in order to undergo expensive hormone therapy and surgery to become a woman.

VA chief Shinseki has a lot to explain.  The deaths of 23 veterans were linked to delayed cancer screenings dating back four years at 13 facilities in nine states.  Six veterans died after delays at a single hospital in Columbia, S.C. Veterans in Fort Collins, Colo., waited months to be seen, and clerks were taught how to falsify appointment records to make it appear the small staff of doctors was meeting performance goals.  Similar games were played at a VA center in Cheyenne, Wyo.  At the VA hospital in Phoenix, a retired doctor charged that some patients facing lengthy waits for appointments were omitted from electronic files and placed on a "secret" paper waiting list.  Forty died, he said, but it is unclear whether their deaths were linked to the delays.

Heroes deserve better.  The tension between the needs of the men and women who serve this country and the agenda of the Department of Veterans Affairs under Secretary Eric Shinseki is at a breaking point.  With lives and American promises on the line, it's time for the man charged with keeping them to step up, or step aside.

Obama's Pick for VA Health Supervised Scandal-Tainted Hospital.  This doesn't look good.  The person nominated two weeks ago to replace the VA's outgoing undersecretary for health was responsible for supervising one of the hospitals at the center of the current scandal.  Dr. Jeffrey Murawsky was nominated on May 1 to replace Dr. Robert Petzel as undersecretary of health at the Department of Veterans of Affairs.  Petzel's "resignation" was officially announced today, although his impending retirement was first announced last September.  Murawsky is currently the network director — effectively the CEO — of the VA region that includes the Edward Hines, Jr. VA Hospital in Chicago.  Before he moved up the VA hierarchy, he worked as a manager at the hospital.

High-level resignation rocks Veterans Affairs Department amid deadly health care scandal, but Republicans still smell blood.  The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs official in charge of the agency's sprawling health care system resigned abruptly on Friday [5/16/2014], just a day after telling a U.S. Senate committee that he knew in 2010 about a memo describing 'inappropriate scheduling practices' now blamed for as many as 40 deaths at VA medical centers.  Complaints about long wait lists and falsified patient appointment reports have dogged VA hospitals and clinics nationwide.

VA Official Who Takes the Fall Was Already Set to Retire This Year.  Today's resignation of the Veterans Affairs undersecretary for health may have been timed to look like a fall guy was anointed after Robert Petzel and his department faced criticism at a Senate Veterans Affairs Committee hearing.  But the chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee called shenanigans: Petzel was already due to retire this year.

VA official out over vet deaths scandal — but is it more 'damage control'?  The Obama administration, battling to tamp down yet another scandal, announced the resignation Friday afternoon of a top Veterans Affairs official amid mounting questions over patient deaths possibly tied to delayed care.  But as with prior controversies, the administration's response, critics say, is not nearly aggressive enough.  The official said to be resigning already was planning to retire.  And once again, the president is being accused of relying on political allies to lead internal reviews, without directly firing anyone.

Army Times says VA's Shinseki must step down.  The VA scandal over alleged "secret wait lists" for health care appointments, which may have contributed to the deaths of dozens of veterans whose treatment was delayed, is still unfolding.  Yet the allegations at the core of the scandal are hardly new:  A December 2012 report by the Government Accountability Office revealed that four VA medical centers nationwide hid wait times, fudged data and backdated appointments for the purpose of fabricating compliance with department timeliness goals.  That should have served as a top-down wakeup call to clean house and bring overdue transparency and reform to what long has been viewed as the most dysfunctional agency in the federal system.

VA watchdog says federal prosecutors involved in scandal probe, charges possible.  The chief watchdog for the Department of Veterans Affairs confirmed Thursday that his office is working with federal prosecutors to weigh whether criminal charges are warranted in the health care scandal at a Phoenix VA facility.  VA acting Inspector General Richard J. Griffin, who spoke to lawmakers on Capitol Hill after VA Secretary Eric Shinseki delivered his first public testimony since the scandal broke, vowed to complete an "exhaustive review" and predicted it would be done by around August.

Congress Growing Impatient On Inquiry In VA Deaths.  Patience is wearing thin in Congress as lawmakers confront allegations of treatment delays and falsified patient-appointment reports at health centers run by the Veterans Affairs Department.

One change is not enough for veterans.  Delegating and deferring to a broken bureaucracy that will not be candid about its failures has been a recipe for greater failures — failures that have caused the death of veterans — and now it is surely only a matter of time before President Obama sends Secretary Shinseki the word that he must resign.  Too often Washington sees this kind of ritual bloodletting as the full resolution to a problem, and White Houses of both parties then blithely reuse the same template that caused the bloodletting in the first place. It is time to step back from this particular tragic fall, and ask questions that Washington historically fails to ask.

Shinseki faces bipartisan criticism during Hill hearing on vet health care scandal.  The chief watchdog for the Department of Veterans Affairs confirmed Thursday [5/15/2014] that his office is working with federal prosecutors to weigh whether criminal charges are warranted in the health care scandal at a Phoenix VA facility.  VA acting Inspector General Richard J. Griffin, who spoke to lawmakers on Capitol Hill after VA Secretary Eric Shinseki delivered his first public testimony since the scandal broke, vowed to complete an "exhaustive review" and predicted it would be done by around August.

VA's Shinseki tells second biggest lie of the year.  Thursday morning Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki came before the Senate Veterans Affairs committee and proclaimed — with a straight face — that the VA health care system is "a good system."  While Politifact has already deemed President Obama's infamous "if you like your health care plan, you can keep it" the lie of the year — Shinseki's statement ranks a close, and unfortunate, second.

Dem Senator: FBI Should Investigate VA Hospitals Scandal.  Veterans Affairs secretary Eric Shinseki testified before Congress Thursday that he's "mad as hell" about allegations that veterans were placed on secret waiting lists at VA hospitals and died while awaiting care.  But when Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, called for a criminal investigation into he matter, Shinseki appeared reluctant to take any action until the VA inspector general issues a report on the growing scandal.

Tapper Grills WH Chief of Staff Over VA Scandal.  In an appearance on CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper, White House Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough defended the record of Veterans' Affairs Sec. Eric Shinseki in his post amid a scandal involving fabricated waiting times leading to the death of military veterans. [...] Tapper brought up an outbreak of Legionnaires Disease, which occurred in VA facilities in 2011 under Shinseki's watch.  In spite of a report that indicated that negligence led to that outbreak, no one was held accountable.  "This is not new," he said.  "What can be done to stop this culture of no accountability in the VA system?"

Obama Has Every Reason to Fix the VA. Why Hasn't He?  The failure of the Veterans Affairs Department to quickly compensate veterans for their disabilities is a moral abomination:  It leaves soldiers wounded by war waiting in long lines for payments they need and believe they have earned.  And VA failures are under new scrutiny amid reports of a string of preventable deaths among veterans and a growing political controversy around them — and many in Congress are pointing a finger in the White House's direction.

Cascade of scandals has Veterans Secretary Eric Shinseki fighting for his job.  Eric Shinseki's troubles began with a "Patton" video.  Now the secretary of Veterans Affairs is facing charges that veterans are needlessly dying on his watch as the head of the largest civilian agency in the federal government.  Scandals have cascaded over Shinseki and the VA since the Washington Examiner revealed in August 2012 that $50,000 in taxpayer money was spent to produce a pair of video parodies that came to define the lavish spending at the two Veterans Affairs training conferences in Orlando.  Those conferences cost taxpayers about $6.1 million, of which as much as $762,000 was squandered on useless baubles like tote bags, pedometers and unnecessary travel, the VA inspector general later found.

Memos Show VA Staffers Have Been 'Gaming System' for Six Years.  Internal memos show the VA has been playing whack a mole for at least six years with employees who use dozens of different scheduling tricks to hide substantial delays in health care for America's veterans.  And whenever the VA tries to stop its staffers from "gaming the system," the staffers come up with new techniques.  Whistleblowers around the country are now accusing the VA of hiding a backlog in patient care with bookkeeping tricks, and a former doctor at a VA facility in Arizona says the delays may have contributed to the deaths of 40 patients.

Ailing vet turns to 911 in absence of timely VA care.  William "Bill" Webb says he tried to get timely doctor appointments in the Phoenix VA Health Care System, repeatedly failed and would be dead today if he hadn't dialed 911 and been taken to another hospital by ambulance.  The 87-year-old Army veteran of World War II says his struggles began about two years ago, long after he'd become a patient in the Phoenix VA network.  Somehow, his records vanished.  "They lost me," Webb says.  "They said I'm no longer a patient.  I'd been going there for years, and suddenly, I no longer exist."

Dem Senator: VA Is Doing a 'Good Job'.  On Wednesday's [5/14/2014] broadcast of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) defended the Department of Veterans Affairs despite a handful of recent deaths pinned to so-called "secret waitlists" at its hospitals.  Tester, a member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, said despite these incidents, the VA is doing a "good job" in a broad overall sense.

Obama acts like he doesn't care about growing Veterans Affairs scandal.  There's a new story almost every day about how the Department of Veterans Affairs continues to fail veterans under its care.  The drumbeat of media attention has led the American Legion and a growing list of lawmakers to demand the resignation of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki.  What was Obama's response?  To say — through a spokesman — that he has confidence in Shinseki and has ordered him to investigate.

Eric Holder: No Plans at DOJ to Investigate Secret Waiting Lists and Veteran Deaths at VA Hospitals.  Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday [5/13/2014] that the Department of Justice doesn't have any plans to investigate allegations that veterans placed on secret waiting lists at VA hospitals died while waiting for care. [...] According to CNN, at least 40 veterans died while waiting for treatment at one VA hospital in Phoenix.  Members of Congress have said in recent weeks that the inspector general investigation is inadequate and have called on the DOJ to launch its own investigation.

Committee head wants Obama to name special commission to investigate Veterans Affairs patient deaths.  An independent commission is needed to investigate whether patients are dying because of botched care by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the chairman of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee said in a letter sent Tuesday [5/13/2014] to President Obama.  Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., asked Obama to create a special, bipartisan commission to probe near-daily revelations about botched care, long delays, preventable deaths and manipulation of records at Veterans Affairs medical facilities across the country.  Miller noted the flood of media reports and whistleblowers coming forward in recent days to report wrongdoing since he revealed last month that the veterans' committee was investigating allegations as many as 40 preventable deaths occurred at the Phoenix VA alone.

Bernie Sanders Blames Koch Brothers for VA Scandal.  The Department of Veterans affairs has fallen under increased scrutiny over revelations administrators in Phoenix and elsewhere created off the books waiting lists for veterans seeking care.  Several veterans died while waiting on the secret lists.  Sanders forcefully defended the VA and other federal agencies at the forum, stating the VA provides "very high quality healthcare" and programs such as Medicare and Social Security are "enormously popular."  However, Sanders's critique of the VA scandal then took a bizarre turn.

Chuck Todd: VA Scandal More Dangerous for Obama than 'Partisanized' Benghazi.  MSNBC host and NBC News' Chief White House Correspondent Chuck Todd warned on Monday that the budding scandal surrounding some Veterans' Administration employees admitting to "gaming the system" and hiding patients' wait times is politically "dangerous" for President Barack Obama and democrats.  "Much more so," he asserted, "than the partsianized Benghazi [investigation]."  Todd closed Monday's edition of MSNBC's The Daily Rundown with a brief review of the scandal surrounding some VA hospitals deliberately obscuring the true wait times that some veterans endured.

Whistleblower says Veterans Affairs cost-cutting led to denials, delays in life-saving cancer tests.  Patients in a Southeast Texas Department of Veterans Affairs medical system faced denials or long delays in getting routine colonoscopies and other medical tests because of bureaucratic cost-cutting, a former top administrator told the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview.

Email reveals how Wyo. VA workers were taught to manipulate records.  An email obtained by Fox News Friday [5/9/2014] revealed that an employee at a Wyoming VA hospital instructed his workers to manipulate records to make it seem like patients were being seen within the agency's required 14-day window, which he described as "gaming the system."  Fox News has learned that the VA was informed of dubious scheduling practices at the Cheyenne VA Medical Center and at a community-based outpatient clinic in Fort Collins, Colorado, which is part of the Wyoming center, through an internal investigation in December 2013.  The problems at and the investigation into the Fort Collins clinic were reported earlier this week.

Does the V.A. Have More Secret, Deadly Wait Lists?  Outrage has been building since claims emerged last week that at least 40 veterans died while waiting for treatment from a Phoenix VA hospital.  A whistleblower who had worked at the Phoenix VA alleged that the facility placed veterans on a secret waiting list to hide the fact that they had even sought care.  But in the furor over the latest revelations, an even larger and more serious problem may be getting lost.  It's likely that there are more secret wait lists concealing patient delays throughout the VA medical system, putting untold numbers of veterans in jeopardy.

Widow: Veteran was unable to see primary care doctor.  Until he moved to Phoenix from Indiana last spring, Michael Olson never had any trouble with Veterans Affairs health care, according to his widow.  But after nearly a year of trying to get an appointment with a primary-care doctor at the Phoenix VA Health Care System, his widow, Vicky, says, the 45-year-old former Marine died from complications of hypertension, obesity and asthma on March 30.  "I thought Mike had fallen through the cracks until all the stories came out.  Now, I'm wondering — was he kept from care by design and was it deliberate?" Vicky Olson said of her deceased husband.

Latest insult to U.S. veterans: Wait times for medical care.  By the government's own estimate just last month, the average American waits about 26 minutes in a hospital emergency room before being treated.  But on average, war veterans must wait twice that long for the same care at Veterans Affairs hospital centers, and a string of internal investigations suggests the ER wait times for retired troops frequently can last hours.  The disparity, documented in a Washington Times review of VA and Medicare records, is raising questions about why Americans who have given all to serve the country can't get the same speedy care from the VA that they would if they went to local hospitals.  Sometimes, the consequences of delayed treatment can be fatal.

Lawmakers to subpoena VA secretary Shinseki in veterans health care probe.  Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki has ordered a "face-to-face audit" at all Department of Veterans Affairs clinics, a spokeswoman told CNN on Thursday [5/8/2014].  Earlier in the day, the House Veterans Affairs Committee voted to subpoena Shinseki in the wake of accusations that his department is responsible for deadly delays in health care at some of its hospitals.  The Shinseki subpoena will cover e-mails that allegedly discussed the destruction of a secret list, first reported by CNN, of veterans waiting for care at a Phoenix VA hospital.

Obama backs Shinseki despite calls to resign.  President Obama is standing by Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki despite two prominent veterans groups calling for his resignation, the White House said Tuesday.  Both the American Legion and Concerned Veterans for America have called for Shinseki to step down following revelations that veterans at VA hospitals across the country died waiting for care.

VA Health Scandals Foreshadow Life Under ObamaCare.  Government-run VA health clinics have been caught falsifying records to hide obscenely long and sometimes deadly delays in treating veterans.  Welcome to the future of health care under ObamaCare.

The Veterans Administration Scandal Hits Home.  For anyone laboring under the assumption that the scandal that plagues the VA hospital in Phoenix, Arizona must be anomalous, think again.  Without even delving into the medical malpractice testimonials of my three relatives who work at a VA Medical Center on the East coast, the recent near-death experience of my brother confirms our worst fears:  the culture of corruption and indifference that afflicts the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is systemic.

Bureaucracy doesn't just hurt — it kills.  Government death panels weren't invented by Obamacare.  By hiding a list of 1,600 veterans waiting to see doctors in Phoenix, the Department of Veterans Affairs is accused of 40 deaths of those who died for lack of care.  Keeping them off the official list concealed the backlog and made VA bureaucrats look better and qualify for bonuses.  So far, no firings, no disciplinary actions, no screaming on the evening news has resulted, although the inspector general for VA is looking into it at the insistence of Arizona lawmakers.

Veterans Secretary Eric Shinseki is missing in action.  Like most presidents before him, President Obama has surrounded himself with a cabinet full of gray non-eminences.  With the notable exceptions of Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta and Kathleen Sebelius, Obama's department secretaries have been little known to most Americans.  Even so, were there to be an award for the most obscure Obama cabinet secretary, it would undoubtedly go to Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki.  His department is the federal government's second-biggest bureaucracy — only the Department of Defense has more employees — and it is supposed to care for the noble men and women who served this country in its military.

Shocking Charges at VA Likely To Be But the Start Of an Even Worse Scandal.  The nation was shocked by charges that more than 1,400 vets lingered and 40 died on a secret waiting list at the Phoenix, Arizona, Veterans Administration A medical center.  The list was concocted to conceal long waits for care.  What you haven't heard is even worse.  VA hospitals all over the country are manipulating the official electronic waiting list, and the deadly cover ups have been going on for years.

VA Hides Names of Hospitals Where Vets Died From Delays.  The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) blocked the release of the names of hospitals where 19 veterans died because of delays in medical screenings, leading to calls for transparency from news outlets and a bipartisan group of Capitol Hill lawmakers.  Earlier this month, the VA denied a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Tampa Tribune reporter Howard Altman, who had been investigating the deaths.

A fatal wait: Veterans languish and die on a VA hospital's secret list.  At least 40 U.S. veterans died waiting for appointments at the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care system, many of whom were placed on a secret waiting list.  The secret list was part of an elaborate scheme designed by Veterans Affairs managers in Phoenix who were trying to hide that 1,400 to 1,600 sick veterans were forced to wait months to see a doctor, according to a recently retired top VA doctor and several high-level sources.

Arizona VA boss accused of covering up veterans' deaths linked to previous scandal.  A Veterans Affairs official accused of keeping double books to hide the fact that dozens of veterans died awaiting care previously ran a Washington state VA facility that allegedly fudged suicide numbers, FoxNews.com has learned.  Sharon Helman, director of the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care system, is accused with other management officials of keeping a fake waiting list that made it appear sick veterans were being treated in a timely manner — while hiding the real list that showed up to 1,600 sick veterans were waiting months to see a physician.

VA Hides Names of Hospitals Where Vets Died From Delays.  The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) blocked the release of the names of hospitals where 19 veterans died because of delays in medical screenings, leading to calls for transparency from news outlets and a bipartisan group of Capitol Hill lawmakers.  Earlier this month, the VA denied a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Tampa Tribune reporter Howard Altman, who had been investigating the deaths.

American Legion calls on VA secretary to resign amid scandals.  The head of the American Legion called Monday [5/5/2014] for Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki and other top VA officials to resign over a series of scandals that have rocked the agency.  Decrying what he described as "poor oversight and failed leadership," the group's National Commander Dan Dellinger said the problems with the department need to be addressed at the "highest level," starting with new leadership.  He said this is the first time the organization has called for such resignations in more than 30 years.  "It is obvious the issues are more widespread within the VA," Dellinger said, faulting "bureaucratic incompetence and failed leadership."

The VA's Backlog of Unprocessed Claims Swells Under Obama-Shinseki.  [Scroll down]  Meanwhile, albeit largely ignored by the mainstream media, Obama's own veterans affairs "scandal" was unfolding — an enormous backlog of veterans claims.  In 2011, the claims backlog ballooned by 155 percent.  To its credit, the Washington Post is now covering this matter.  And the more it probes, the worse the matter looks.

Despite backlogs, VA disability claims processors get bonuses.  While veterans waited longer than ever in recent years for their wartime disability compensation, the Department of Veterans Affairs gave its workers millions of dollars in bonuses for "excellent" performances that effectively encouraged them to avoid claims that needed extra work to document veterans' injuries, a News21 investigation has found.

Other VA scandals

VA Hospitals Have a Disappearing Drug Problem.  Opioids and other drugs have been disappearing from the Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals, stolen by employees.  The VA inspector general's office filed 36 new criminal investigations, bringing the total number to a staggering 108 cases.  These cases, according to CBS, involve "missing prescriptions, theft or unauthorized drug use.  Most of those probes typically lead to criminal charges."  This is a stark increase from last year's number, even though the VA promised to have a "zero tolerance" policy regarding drug theft.

VA drug thefts continue despite new efforts.  Federal authorities have launched dozens of new criminal investigations into possible opioid and other drug theft by employees at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals, a sign the problem isn't going away despite new prevention efforts.

VA employee convicted of third DUI returns to work.  An employee at the Memphis, Tenn.  Veteran's Affairs (VA) medical center who was convicted of driving under the influence three times has returned to work as of Monday [5/15/2017].  Brittney Lowe, a senior interior designer at the Memphis VA was convicted in 2009, 2013 and most recently in 2017 of driving under the influence and is now back working at the medical center, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.

While VA Hospital Boasted Of 20-Person Transgender Program, 100,000 Vets Lacked 'Safe' Care.  A Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital that touted its program focusing on 20 transgendered individuals failed in caring for the remaining 111,000 veterans on health care essentials like keeping its medical equipment clean and properly training employees, government auditors found. [...] The hospital in question was the subject of positive news coverage in late 2015, with a publicity campaign surrounding the opening of a "clinic for transgender patients."  Veterans are able to receive taxpayer-funded sex change hormones, CBS News reported at the time.

VA retaliation against whistleblower: doctor kept in empty room.  Dr. Dale Klein may be the highest-paid U.S. government employee who literally does nothing while he's on the clock.  A highly rated pain management specialist at the Southeast Missouri John J. Pershing V.A., Klein is paid $250,000 a year to work with veterans, but instead of helping those who served their country, he sits in a small office and does nothing.  All day.  Every day.  "I sit in a chair and I look at the walls," the doctor said of his typical workday.  "It feels like solitary confinement."

Federal Attorneys Created A Secret VA 'Forum Of Hate'.  Dissident Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) officials created a digital "Forum of Hate" (FOH) using highly offensive email texts against an agency whose upper management they viewed as worried only about getting bonuses for themselves and whose workforce they considered degraded by excessive Affirmative Action hiring.  The high-level employees on the FOH included attorneys, administrative law judges (ALJs) and managers who sent dozens of inflammatory emails per day using their government email accounts, then complained about how they had to work late.  The previously unreported emails occurred in 2015, according to a draft report prepared by the inspector general (IG).  A copy was obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group, but the employees' names were redacted.

VA Hospital Removes Portraits of Trump & New VA Secy Hung by Vets.  When Republican congressman and Army veteran Brian Mast saw that a Florida VA hospital didn't have photographs of President Trump and Secretary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin hanging in the lobby, he took action.  Mast and a group of local veterans brought portraits of Trump and Shulkin to the West Palm Beach VA Medical Center and demanded they be installed, and the whole thing was caught on camera.  They were successful, but within hours management at the hospital took down the pictures.  Their reason?  They could not authenticate the photos and they have to follow protocol.  A VA spokeswoman said that the congressman's actions and the actions of the veterans who accompanied him were "inappropriate."  She said that portraits on display at the VA need to come from the central office.

VA Psychiatrist Busted For Charging $200K In Services He Never Provided.  A Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) psychiatrist has been charged with bilking a health care provider out of $200,000 for services he did not actually provide.  The U.S. Attorney's Office in Rochester announced the charges Thursday, which include health care fraud, tax fraud and money laundering, Rochester First reports.  Dr. Xingjia Cui, who is 52-years-old, works as a psychiatrist at the Canandaigua VA medical center in western New York.  He also runs a private practice.

Army veteran, 74, faces criminal charges and up to six months in jail for hanging flags at a Veterans Affairs facility.  An elderly U.S. Army veteran will go on trial next month for hanging two American flags at a Veterans Affairs facility.  Robert Rosebrock, 74, faces a criminal charge for displaying an American flag without permission outside the Greater Los Angeles Veterans Affairs facility.  He also faces a charge for taking unauthorized photos of VA officers.

VA Employees Charged With Stealing Prescription Drugs To Sell On The Street.  Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) employees have been charged with stealing prescription medications like oxycodone and Viagra to sell on the street.  Satishkumar Patel, Alisha Pagan and Nikita Neal have all been charged with conspiring together to steal and distribute highly addictive drugs, like oxycodone and hydrocodone, Christopher Thyer said in a press release.  Thyer is the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas.  Out of the three, Patel and Pagan are staring down additional charges, including intent to deliver oxycodone, THV11 reports.

VA manager bans Christmas tree from office cubicle.  A VA supervisor in the agency's Philadelphia office sent out an urgent email memo Tuesday [11/29/2016] warning employees to remove a Christmas tree that someone had decorated in the office.  "There is a Christmas tree, ornaments, and decorations in the cubicle across from Luis Stevenson's desk (the same cubicle where the scanner is housed)," wrote VA supervisor Rebecca Cellucci.  "If this belongs to you, please claim it.  Otherwise, it will be discarded on Friday."

VA Exec Who Ran Sketchy Charity Allowed To Retire With Full Benefits.  Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) executive Thomas Burch, who ran a sketchy charity that provided him with lavish trips, will nevertheless retire with full benefits.  Burch, a lawyer for the VA, is set to retire on Nov. 30 with full benefits, despite investigations by the VA and New York Attorney General's office finding that he used his veterans' charity for personal gain, CNN reports.

Family upset after bodies switched at Denver veterans' hospital.  Anthony Sandoval spent his last days at the VA Eastern Colorado Health Care center.  After he died on Oct. 2, Anthony Sandoval's remains were sent to one mortuary, while another man's remains were sent to Sandoval's family for cremation.

Bibles banned!  VA removes Good Book from clinic.  A Bible was removed from the waiting room of a Chillicothe Veteran Affairs Medical Center in Athens, Ohio after a veteran complained.  "Our government is secular, and must remain secular," the unidentified veteran wrote.  Mikey Weinstein, the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, fired off a letter to the medical center on behalf of the veteran — alleging that the presence of the Bible inside a government facility is a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

VA Suicide Hotline Reform Bill Sails Unanimously Through House, Harry Reid Crushes It.  The House approved GOP Rep. David Young's bill last Monday [10/3/2016] by a vote of 357-0.  Young introduced the legislation after hearing numerous complaints from constituents that the Veterans Crisis Line, designed to provide support for veterans feeling suicidal, simply failed to answer emails or calls.  The bipartisan bill passed the House without a hitch and Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar teamed up with GOP Sen. John Thune to move the legislation through the Senate.  Both majority and minority staff on the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs cleared the bill, Meg Baglien, communications director for Young, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.  But a nod from the committee didn't prevent Reid from stopping the bill in its tracks, [...]

Obama's VA desecrating veteran corpses.  I've read a lot of outrageous stories in my day.  But this latest from an Illinois Veterans Affairs whistleblower is one of the most shameful things I've ever seen.  As a veteran, I care deeply about how our current and former military members and their families are treated by the government.  Unfortunately, under President Barack Obama's leadership, the VA has somehow managed to get worse and worse.  Now, reports out of Illinois say that one veteran's hospital is so poorly run, they're leaving the discarded corpses of my fellow brothers-in-arms to rot and decompose over months.

Horrifying Disrespect:  Bodies of Deceased Veterans Left to Rot Hospital Morgue For Months.  Since the Veteran's Affairs scandal broke in 2014, exposing the hospital system and government employees left thousands of veterans on long waiting lists leading to death, the agency has received an increase in spending to deal with the backlog and wait times.  Things have gotten worse, not better.  Wait times have doubled and now, a horrifying report out of Illinois shows bodies of deceased veterans were left in the hospital morgue for months.

Dem Lawmakers Ask VA to Cover Sex-Change Operations.  Six Democratic lawmakers have written the Secretary of The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) urging the removal of a rule banning VA coverage of sex-transition surgeries for veterans.  "We urge you to move forward with publishing a proposed rule to remove the arbitrary and outdated restriction that prohibits VA from providing medical services to treat gender dysphoria," the letter states.  Current VA regulations prohibit the covering of "gender alterations."  The letter says that regulation is in violation of The Affordable Care Act.

VA Hospital Bought $300,000 Worth Of TVs, Then Stored Them.  Detroit's Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital spent $311,000 on TVs that were never used and remain in storage.  The federal agency's facility ordered the 300 TVs "because they had funds available," which "may have violated the bona fide needs rule," according to a new report from the department's inspector general (IG).  Now, the TVs have sat "in storage for about 2½ years.  Further, warranties for the TVs expired."

VA Drops Millions on Delayed Solar Power Projects.  The Department of Veterans Affairs has spent more than $408 million to install solar panels on its medical facilities in recent years, despite many of the projects experiencing significant delays and some of the systems not becoming operational at all.  The VA has failed to effectively plan and manage these solar panel projects, resulting in significant delays and additional costs, according to a report released by the agency's inspector general last week.  The watchdog conducted an audit of 11 of the 15 solar projects awarded between fiscal years 2010 and 2013 that were still in progress as of May last year.  The investigation, which was completed in March, found that only two of the 11 solar panel projects were fully completed.

Watchdog calls for work by veteran artists after report shows VA spent $20M on high-end art.  A taxpayer watchdog group is calling on the Veterans Affairs Administration to showcase work by veteran artists, after it was revealed the VA spent some $20 million on lavish art at facilities around the country. [...] The $19.7 million tab included a $700,000 sculpture to adorn a California facility for blind veterans.  The VA also spent $21,000 for a 27-foot fake Christmas tree; $32,000 for 62 "local image" pictures for the San Francisco VA; and $115,600 for "art consultants" for the Palo Alto facility.

As vets died, VA spent millions on art.  Hundreds of veterans have died while waiting to get care from the Department of Veterans Affairs, all while the department spent millions of taxpayer dollars on high-end art.  According to an investigation by COX Media Washington, D.C. and American Transparency, the VA has spent $20 million on high-end art over the last 10 years, $16 million of that spent during President Obama's tenure.  The investigation found one particularly egregious example:  $670,000 combined spent on two sculptures at a VA center for the blind.

VA Spent $20 Million on Art Amidst Scandal.  The taxpayer watchdog group Open the Books teamed up with COX Media Washington, D.C., for an oversight report on spending at the VA, finding numerous frivolous expenditures on artwork, including six-figure dollar sculptures at facilities for the blind.  "In the now-infamous VA scandal of 2012-2015, the nation was appalled to learn that 1,000 veterans died while waiting to see a doctor," wrote Adam Andrzejewski, the founder and CEO of Open the Books, in an editorial for Forbes.  "Tragically, many calls to the suicide assistance hotline were answered by voicemail.  The health claim appeals process was known as 'the hamster wheel' and the appointment books were cooked in seven of every ten clinics."  "Yet, in the midst of these horrific failings the VA managed to spend $20 million on high-end art over the last ten years — with $16 million spent during the Obama years," Andrzejewski said.

Watchdog: Some texts to VA suicide hotline went unanswered.  Almost 30 percent of text messages sent as a test to a crisis hotline for suicidal veterans went unanswered, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released Monday [6/28/2016].  "Our tests of text messages revealed a potential area of concern," the report reads.  The GAO report follows a scathing inspector general report from February that found some calls to the hotline were going to voicemail or didn't receive immediate attention.

The VA's Suicide Hotline Dropped 1.4 Million Calls Last Year.  Some shocking and disgraceful news out of the VA today: the suicide hotline, which has come under fire for sending calls to voicemail, apparently dropped over a million calls last year. [...] Suicide hotlines, whether they're run through the VA or through any other organization should never be dropping or ignoring calls — or if it were to happen, it should be an incredibly rare instance.

Report criticizes Duckworth for wasting $5.2 million on failed VA marketing campaign.  Illinois Democratic Rep. Tammy Duckworth railed earlier this year against a lack of transparency in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Office of the Inspector General.  Perhaps the congresswoman has a more personal ax to grind.  Duckworth, the former assistant secretary for the Office of Public and Intergovernmental Affairs, is at the center of an inspector general's report blaming Duckworth and the office for wasting $5.2 million in taxpayer money on a failed veteran outreach initiative.

Another VA Scandal:  Clinic Caught Falsifying Wait Times For Veterans.  After being alerted by a whistleblower that leaders at a VA Medical Center in Houston were telling staff to falsify wait times, the Veteran's Affairs inspector general took a look.  What the IG found is alarming.  More than a year after the national scandal broke that exposed widespread delays and attempts by officials to hide them, this clinic was still masking chronic wait times for veterans.  The report found that the Houston VA Center repeatedly recorded the times the clinic canceled an appointment as a patient cancellation.

Lawmakers fume after VA ditches power to fire employees.  The Department of Veterans Affairs has angered and frustrated lawmakers by deciding to stop using their authority to fire senior employees, an authority Congress gave the VA in response to the wait-times scandal of 2014.  "Everyone knows VA isn't very good at disciplining employees, but this decision calls into question whether department leaders are even interested in doing so," House Veterans Affairs Committee chairman Jeff Miller, R-Fla., said Friday [6/17/2016].  The expedited firing process was designed to help VA leaders flush out senior officials who had overseen the manipulation of wait times, which prevent veterans from receiving timely healthcare.  But it hasn't been used much, and it provoked a number of legal challenges from fired employees.

VA Fires First Negligent Officials in 18 Months.  The Department of Veterans' Affairs fired three senior officials from the Phoenix VA health care system Wednesday, marking the first dismissals linked to the mismanagement in Arizona since the system's director was ousted in November 2014.  Associate director Lance Robinson, chief of Health Administration Service Brad Curry, and hospital chief of staff Dr.  Darren Deering were all removed for negligent performance and failure to provide effective oversight for properly scheduled appointments, according to a news release from the department.

Lawmakers furious at DOJ move that could protect fired VA official.  Lawmakers are fuming over what they describe as a "shameful" decision by the Justice Department that could help the former head of the scandal-scarred Phoenix Veterans Affairs hospital get her job back.  Attorney General Loretta Lynch, in a letter sent Tuesday, notified House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., that the DOJ would not defend a key provision of the Veteran Affairs reform law, passed in the wake of the scandal over officials covering up long patient wait-times.  The provision in question had helped uphold the expedited firing of the Phoenix official at the heart of the scandal, Sharon Helman.

Hottest battle in Washington may be over VA's plan to expand nurses' powers.  From his Fresno, California, office, Dr.  Andrew Wall has joined what's fast become a national fight over the powers granted to Department of Veterans Affairs nurses.  Citing potential physician shortages, the department wants to expand its nurses' roles in advanced care.  The proposal has split the medical community, drawn congressional attention and prompted more than 11,700 public comments as of Friday afternoon [6/3/2016], making it the hottest topic in the federal regulatory world.  A number of doctors oppose the VA's idea.

VA takes heat over plan to let nurses treat vets without doc supervision.  The Veterans Affairs Department is taking heat over a proposal to allow highly trained nurses to act as doctors, and even administer anesthesia without a doctor's supervision.  The move is part of an effort to reduce what is largely recognized as the VA's greatest problem — long wait-times for doctor visits.  But some see it as an ill-conceived plan that could put veterans at risk.  "When you have a veteran on the operating table with multiple medical conditions, seconds count," said former president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists Dr.  Jane Fitch, who was once a nurse herself.  "All those years of education and training can make the difference between life and death."

Lawmakers furious at DOJ move that could protect fired VA official.  Lawmakers are fuming over what they describe as a "shameful" decision by the Justice Department that could help the former head of the scandal-scarred Phoenix Veterans Affairs hospital get her job back.  Attorney General Loretta Lynch, in a letter sent Tuesday [5/31/2016], notified House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., that the DOJ would not defend a key provision of the Veteran Affairs reform law, passed in the wake of the scandal over officials covering up long patient wait-times.  The provision in question had helped uphold the expedited firing of the Phoenix official at the heart of the scandal, Sharon Helman.  Now, lawmakers say Lynch's decision could put Helman back on the job, as she pursues a lawsuit against the government.

Veterans Affairs Paid Out $338 Million in Legal Settlements Just for 2015.  A new report on Monday [5/30/2016] says the Department of Veterans Affairs paid out more than $338 million in legal settlements in 2015, more than triple the amount paid out in 2011.  The report is the latest in an already bad week for the Veterans Administration.  If it was not such a serious issue, one might find some humor in it as example of yet another tangled federal bureaucracy.  The care of our veterans is serious, however, and should not be a partisan issue.  It is past time to get them the quality treatment they deserve, in a timely manner.

Obama Political Appointee 'Burrows' Into Permanent Job at VA.  An Obama administration political appointee has "burrowed" into a high-level career civil service job at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), highlighting efforts by backers of the outgoing chief executive to implant themselves permanently into the federal bureaucracy in the waning months of his presidency.  Gina Farrisee was named deputy of chief of staff of the VA earlier this month, thus complicating the next president's VA secretary's ability to choose his own inner circle but securing high and continuing pay for Farrisee, whose job otherwise would have ended this year.

The VA Declared Thousands Of Living Veterans Dead, Cut Off Their Benefits.  When the VA isn't leaving veterans to die waiting in line for healthcare at hospitals across the country, the disastrous system is declaring veterans who are alive and well... dead.  VA officials are now admitting the agency declared more than 4,000 living veterans, dead, cutting off their benefits.  Navy Veteran Mike Rieker from Florida is one of them.  "The system failed, whatever they're doing doesn't work.  It was supposed to be corrected and of course it wasn't," Rieker told Fox and Friends during a recent interview.  "Things move at the speed of darkness at the VA."

VA wrongly declares thousands of veterans dead, stops benefits.  Some 4,000 U.S. military veterans and their families stopped receiving benefits over the past five years after they were wrongly declared dead, the newest in a string of problems to emerge from the Department of Veterans Affairs.  The VA said benefits were mistakenly terminated for 4,201 veterans from 2011 to 2015 but subsequently reinstated.

VA secretary:  Disney doesn't measure wait times, so why should VA?  Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald on Monday compared the length of time veterans wait to receive health care at the VA to the length of time people wait for rides at Disneyland, and said his agency shouldn't use wait times as a measure of success because Disney doesn't either.  "When you got to Disney, do they measure the number of hours you wait in line?  Or what's important?  What's important is, what's your satisfaction with the experience?" McDonald said Monday [5/23/2016] during a Christian Science Monitor breakfast with reporters.  "And what I would like to move to, eventually, is that kind of measure."

Senators calls for VA chief to resign over Disney remark.  After a barrage of criticism for his remarks comparing wait times for veterans who are VA patients to lines at a Disney amusement park, the secretary of veterans affairs is trying to explain.  The remarks led at least two Republican senators to call for Secretary Robert McDonald's resignation Tuesday [5/24/2016].  McDonald was criticized for his statement to reporters about the relative importance of measuring wait times or the overall experience at VA facilities, which he said veterans rate highly.

VA secretary facing bipartisan firestorm over Disney comments.  Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald is scrambling to calm a growing bipartisan firestorm after downplaying veteran wait times at VA hospitals by comparing them to wait times for rides at Disney theme parks.  McDonald made the comments Monday morning, and faced a backlash from Capitol Hill almost immediately.  Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., went so far Tuesday as to call for McDonald's resignation.

VA: No apology, blames wait time scandal on computer program.  The Department of Veterans Affairs on Monday sought to clarify VA Secretary Robert McDonald's controversial comparison between the VA's wait times and wait times at Disneyland, by saying veterans themselves have said wait times are not the only important factor when it comes to healthcare at the VA.  But the VA declined to apologize for McDonald's remarks, which angered members of both parties on Monday, and declined to admit that the wait time scandal that broke in 2014 was the result of purposeful manipulation of data by VA workers.  Instead, the VA blamed it on a bad computer program.

VA secretary:  Disney doesn't measure wait times, so why should VA?  Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald on Monday [5/23/2016] compared the length of time veterans wait to receive health care at the VA to the length of time people wait for rides at Disneyland, and said his agency shouldn't use wait times as a measure of success because Disney doesn't either.  "When you got to Disney, do they measure the number of hours you wait in line?  Or what's important?  What's important is, what's your satisfaction with the experience?"

VA Secretary Compares Long Hospital Waits To Lines At Disneyland.  Critics said Monday [5/23/2016] that Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald had trivialized the long-standing problem of lengthy wait times for appointments at California's veterans medical centers by comparing them to waiting in long lines at Disneyland.  His comments sparked an angry backlash from California lawmakers who felt that he had dismissed the angst and frustration of their constituents.  McDonald made the comments Monday during a roundtable discussion with reporters hosted by The Christian Science Monitor.

To illustrate his point, he cited the long lines at Disney theme parks..  Veterans Affairs Secretary Bob McDonald does not think that measuring the number of days it takes for a veteran to receive a medical appointment is a valid assessment of success for the Obama administration's VA.  "To me personally, the day to an appointment is really not what we should be measuring, what we should be measuring is the veterans satisfaction," he said.  To illustrate his point, he cited the long lines at Disney theme parks.

House would ban Confederate flags on VA cemetery flagpoles.  The 265-159 vote would block descendants and others seeking to commemorate veterans of the Confederate States of America from flying the Confederate Battle Flag over mass graves, even on days that flag displays are permitted.

VA lawyer runs 'worst' veterans charity, speeds off in Rolls Royce when confronted.  The nation's lowest-rated veterans charity is run by a lawyer at the Department of Veterans Affairs with a six-figure income.  The National Vietnam Veterans Foundation gave just $122,000 in cash donations to veterans in 2014 despite pulling in $8.5 million, tax records obtained by CNN show.  J. Thomas Burch, the CEO and founder of the National Vietnam Veterans Foundation, sped off in a Rolls Royce when confronted by the network on Monday [5/16/2016].

'Worst' charity for veterans run by VA employee.  At first glance, the National Vietnam Veterans Foundation is a roaring success.  According to its tax filings, the charity has received more than $29 million in donations from generous Americans from 2010 to 2014 for what it calls on its website "aiding, supporting and benefiting America's veterans and their families."  But look a little closer on those same filings and you can see that nearly all of those donations have been cycled back to telemarketers, leaving less than 2 percent for actual veterans and veterans' charitable causes.

Surprise VA Kitchen Inspection After Reports of Roaches in Food.  The Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General went "hunting for bugs" in the middle of the night at two VA kitchens Tuesday after a Conservative Review investigation revealed allegations of an infestation so severe that cockroaches were served in patients' meals.  The inspectors descended upon Edward Hines Jr.  VA Hospital in suburban Chicago at 3 a.m. to "conduct an impromptu walk-through of the kitchens," according to an internal VA email sent to union leaders at 7:24 a.m.  "They were hunting for bugs, I believe that's what they were doing at 3 o'clock in the morning," said dietician Kelvin Gilkey, who recently retired from Hines VA Hospital in Hines, Ill., after 33 years.  He served as the union steward for the kitchen employees and now works as a volunteer union liaison.

Chicago VA Denies Infested Kitchen is a Problem, Employees Say.  A Chicago-area Veterans Affairs hospital overrun by cockroaches in its kitchen and food has been advised to "keep doing what they're doing" because the infestation isn't very severe, employees say.  This was the recommendation of two exterminators employed by a Wisconsin VA hospital who surveyed the kitchen at Edward Hines Jr.  VA Hospital in Hines, Ill.  The pair met with upper management and union representatives Wednesday [4/27/2016] and said they didn't see any cockroaches during their visit, according to social worker and union president Germaine Clarno and union steward Kelvin Gilney, who were present in the meeting.

Ted Cruz Joins Lawmakers Asking VA Sec To Explain Clinic Bible Removals.  Texas Sen. Ted Cruz quietly joined 38 congressional lawmakers on Thursday [4/28/2016] asking Veterans Administration Secretary Robert McDonald to justify the removal of Christian Bibles from POW-MIA display tables at three VA clinics and an air force base.  The Bibles were yanked after objections from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation on behalf of mostly Christian clients at the facilities.  MRFF president Mikey Weinstein contended that their display violated the Establishment Clause plus military and VA regulations.

Bias alert!
One must wonder why the word quietly was included in the first sentence of the article above.  Is the writer trying to imply that Senator Cruz is getting away with something?

Cockroaches Served for Dinner at Chicago-Area VA Hospital.  A vermin infestation has overrun the kitchen of a suburban Chicago Veterans Affairs hospital and is reportedly so severe that cockroaches routinely crawl across countertops as cooks prepare meals.  The insects have even found their way into patients' food, employees say.  The bug invasion has attracted the attention of a U.S. senator who is demanding to know how the VA is fixing the problem.  It's just the latest scandal at an agency rocked by allegations of abuse, incompetence and the needless deaths of veterans who wait years for medical appointments.  "The workers try to brush the cockroaches off the counters, but the bugs get in the food," said Germaine Clarno, a social worker at the Edward Hines, Jr.  VA Hospital in the Chicago suburb of Hines, Ill.  Clarno is the local AFGE union president and has been working with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel as a whistleblower exposing secret appointment wait lists.

V.A. Stiffing Doctors, Abusing Vets to End Challenge to Government Unions.  A free-choice program implemented to get veterans crucial medical care is under siege because the Department of Veterans Affairs has not paid millions of dollars owed to the doctors providing it.  Now, the VA employee union, which opposes letting veterans get care outside their system in the first place, is citing VA employees' failure as the reason to abort the fix.  Congress approved the Choice Card program in 2014 after a flood of media reports of veterans dying as VA facilities across the nation manipulated official data to conceal long delays in scheduling appointments.  The Choice Card program allows veterans to seek private medical care if VA is unable to provide it within a month of being requested, or if there is no VA facility near their homes.  Not long after the program began, however, non-VA doctors and hospitals began complaining they weren't being paid for their services.

Unaccountable V.A.  Caught Coaching Employees on How to Cheat Oversight.  Management at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical centers in California selected and coached employees on exactly what to tell investigators about wait time manipulation, according to new inspector general reports.  According to two whistleblowers, management handpicked medical support assistants and told them what to tell the Veterans Health Administration Inspection Team, which visited the San Diego medical center in May, 2014, following the wait time manipulation scandal which rocked the Phoenix VA.  One of the medical support assistants said he was afraid to tell inspectors anything because a supervisor was in the interview with him.  Investigators were initially tipped off to misdeeds at the medical center in San Diego by a whistleblower, who said employees were being improperly trained and pressured by management to "zero out" appointment wait times.

VA Boss Promoted After Steering $4M Contract To Relative.  A Department of Veterans Affairs manager who steered a $4 million contract to a relative was promoted to the second-highest position in the hospital weeks after she was caught and exposed in the national media.  Wendy Gillis was the project manager in charge of building a new health center for the Fayetteville, North Carolina VA hospital, which included helping find a plot of land to build it on.  The hospital evaluated 16 plots, five of which were owned by relatives of Gillis.  A committee ranked them by suitability, and a non-Gillis plot was determined to be best.  But in an "unusual" move, the VA selected land owned by William Gillis instead, and paid him $4.25 million.

Veteran dies after setting himself on fire outside New Jersey VA clinic.  A 51-year-old veteran died Saturday night after he set himself on fire outside a Department of Veterans Affairs clinic in New Jersey.  Northfield police said Charles R. Ingram III of Egg Harbor Township was airlifted Saturday afternoon to the Temple Burn Center in Philadelphia, where he died later that night, The Press of Atlantic City reported Wednesday [3/23/2016].  Mr. Ingram reportedly used gasoline as an accelerant and set himself on fire at the clinic at 1901 New Road, which was closed at the time.  The Northfield clinic is part of the Wilmington VA Medical Center system.

Reaction to the article immediately above:
Requiem for a VA Victim.  The bloated VA system now employs nearly 400,000 people to carry out its purported "mission of caring."  The CBOCs were established to "to more efficiently and effectively serve eligible veterans and provide care in the most appropriate setting," according to the feds.  But nobody from [Charles Richard] Ingram's CBOC — one of 800 such offices run by the VA, which boasts a record $150 billion budget — was there to help on that Saturday when Ingram perished.  Why not?  Because the facility is closed on weekends.  Its daytime, weekday hours (8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.) serve the convenience of the government employees, not of the men and women who put their lives on the line for their country.  Area veterans' advocates and local officials in both political parties have pushed for years to address chronic understaffing and Soviet-era wait times.  The Atlantic City Press reports that there is just one lone psychologist to provide therapy to 200 veterans on any given day.

VA worker reinstated with back pay after missing time due to being in prison for armed robbery.  The VA is a place where people tend to somehow magically fail upward.  By that I simply mean that workers at all levels can be caught up in any sort of malfeasance or incompetence and not only retain their jobs, but apparently profit from their actions.

VA Worker Gets Job Back Despite Armed Robbery Charge.  A Department of Veterans Affairs employee in Puerto Rico was fired after being arrested for armed robbery, but her union quickly got her reinstated — despite a guilty plea — by pointing out that management's labor relations negotiator is a registered sex offender, and the hospital's director was once arrested and found with painkiller drugs.  The woman missed work while sitting in jail but was reinstated in March with back pay.  The incident illustrates how union-backed civil service rules that rely on precedent combine with VA's past failures to discipline problem employees of all ranks to keep convicted criminals on its payroll.

VA Demands Double Salaries for its Bad Managers.  Just when you thought they'd plumbed every depth of human depravity, and summitted the seven pinnacles of greed on each of the seven continents, the senior management of the Department of Veterans Affairs, an organization run entirely for the benefit of its employees whilst giving lip service (if not abuse) to the vets it presumably serves, calls for doubling the pay of the current underperformers whose mis-, mal-, and non-feasance created this whole mess.

Failed St. Louis VA Chief Got Plush Job, Free House in Philippines.  Rima Nelson disappeared from public view after the St. Louis Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital she managed potentially exposed 1,800 patients to HIV, was closed twice for serious medical safety issues and ranked dead last in patient satisfaction.  But Nelson wasn't fired.  Her VA superiors hid her literally on the other side of the Earth in 2013 at the department's only foreign facility, a seldom-used clinic inside the palatial U.S. Embassy in the Philippines capital city of Manila.

Veterans' hospital in Cincinnati faces scrutiny after report.  U.S. Republican Senator Rob Portman on Wednesday [2/17/2016] asked an independent watchdog to look into "deeply disturbing" allegations of poor care and conflicts of interest at a Veterans Affairs hospital in his home state of Ohio.

VA suicide hotline in Oscar-winning documentary lets calls go to voicemail.  A VA suicide hotline movingly portrayed in an Oscar-winning documentary has allowed crisis calls to go into voicemail and has struggled with adequate staff training, according to an inspector general investigation.  Inspectors found problems occurred when calls were routed to backup crisis centers after staff at the Department of Veterans Affairs suicide hotline center in Canandaigua, N.Y., (800-273-8255) were taking all the calls they could handle.

IG probes alleged 'misconduct' at Cincinnati VA, focus purportedly on prescriptions.  A recent federal probe into alleged "misconduct" at a Department of Veterans Affairs facility in Cincinnati is focusing on allegations of drugs being improperly prescribed to patients, Fox News learned Saturday [2/13/2016].  The agency's inspector general is purportedly looking into whether Dr. Barbara Temeck, the facility's acting chief of staff and a thoracic surgeon, carries proper authority to prescribe medicine.  Among the allegations is that Temeck prescribed medication to the wife of Jack Hetrick, the director of the VA region that includes Ohio, Indiana and Michigan.

VA demands proof World War II combat vet with Purple Heart served in military.  The Veterans Affairs Department refuses to pay benefits to a World War II vet in his 90s who was wounded in combat and earned a Purple Heart.  Fox 2 Now in St. Louis reports that after Emil Limpert submitted an application for benefits to the Department of Veterans Affairs he was told he needed to provide more proof that he was in the military.  "I get this letter that says we can't accept it because we've got no record of you being in the service," he told the station.  "I guess I'm the unknown soldier."  He was wounded in a foxhole in the Philippines in 1944.

VA defends officials who allegedly stole $400,000 from agency.  A high-ranking Department of Veterans Affairs official on Tuesday [2/2/2016] defended the VA's failure to discipline two employees accused of misconduct, and blamed the outrage over their lenient treatment on "considerable external pressure" by the media and Congress to punish personnel who may not have done anything wrong.  Sloan Gibson, deputy VA secretary, praised a judge's recent decision to stop the demotions of Diana Rubens and Kimberly Graves, two VA officials accused of together stealing more than $400,000 in benefits from the government.

VA execs finally demoted for scamming system, but lawmaker wants charges brought.  The Department of Veterans Affairs said Friday [1/8/2016] two high-ranking officials were finally demoted in response to a federal probe that found they manipulated the agency's personnel system for their own gain, but a key lawmaker is asking why they weren't prosecuted.  Federal prosecutors announced on Christmas Eve that they would not pursue charges in the case, but the Justice Department has not responded to Rep. Jeff Miller's inquiry into why no charges will be filed.

VA refuses to fire people for having sex in the office — or selling heroin.  [Scroll down]  Suffice it to say that the VA continues to conduct itself in a manner unbecoming to the sacrifice made by veterans for this nation's security.  The responsibility for that, more than eighteen months after the VA scandal first broke, extends farther northward than [Secretary Robert] McDonald.

Vet's mom forced to sell Obama letter to cover VA failures he promised to fix.  The mother of an injured Army veteran of the Iraq war is selling a rare letter from President Obama to cover her son's medical and personal expenses despite the president's handwritten promise to do "everything we can over the next four years to support your family."  Cherry McKimmey told [the Washingtonn Examiner], "Something good might as well come out of that.  It is doing no good lying in my drawer.  It means absolutely nothing to me."

Failing Upward at the VA.  A week after a sham "demotion" resulting from corruption that triggered a criminal referral, the VA's Kimberly Graves miraculously bounced back with a promotion to Assistant Director of the troubled Phoenix Regional Benefits Office. [...] And nothing says "trust me" like lawyering up and taking the Fifth.  The promotion comes with a plush transfer and moving allowance.  Naturally.

Yet another Veterans Affairs backlog.  Thanks to the actions of a courageous whistleblower, it appears as though the VA — through either indifference or incompetence — is keeping promised benefits from service members.  Tens of thousands of combat veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan are being denied enrollment in VA health care because of a computer glitch VA has known about for seven months and failed to fix.

VA Christmas Tree Ban Causes Yuletide Uprising.  Folks around Salem, Virginia were ready to jingle the government's bells after they implemented a ban on Christmas trees and religious Christmas carols in the public spaces of the local VA hospital.  The holiday hullabaloo began last week when workers received an email announcing that Christmas trees would no longer be allowed in public spaces at the Salem Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Veteran Jumps to His Death at V.A. Hospital.  A military veteran seeking psychiatric treatment walked out of a waiting room at the Veteran Affairs medical center in Philadelphia and jumped to his death from its parking garage Thursday morning [11/19/2015].  Gary Dorman of Mount Vernon, Pennsylvania, took his own life after he sought treatment at the hospital, an employee at the hospital told The Daily Beast.

Obama's Veterans Affairs Facility Just Banned 'Merry Christmas'.  It's becoming Christmas season again, so you know what that means:  The politically correct police are back in full swing trying to force everyone to say 'Happy holidays' instead of 'Merry Christmas.'  Obama's latest move to do this is at a Veterans Affairs hospital.

Obama's VA Facility Bans 'Merry Christmas'.  President Barack Obama's Department of Veterans Affairs has banned employees at its facility in Salem, Virginia, from saying "Merry Christmas" to veterans.  It started as a broader ban that included Christmas trees.  Federal law recognizes Christmas as an official federal holiday (5 U.S.C. § 6103) and provides federal employees with a paid day off to celebrate the Christian belief in the virgin birth of Jesus Christ.

Ruling: Former Phoenix VA boss Sharon Helman may keep bonus.  The Department of Veterans Affairs cannot rescind a bonus paid to former Phoenix VA hospital Director Sharon Helman shortly before she was fired last year for misconduct, according to a ruling by an administrative judge.  The VA had moved to take back $9,080 awarded to Helman, claiming the bonus and a pay raise were issued by mistake.  But judge Alan Caramella, in a Sept. 16 decision, sanctioned the VA for failing to produce key evidence and ruled Helman may keep the extra cash she received for meeting fiscal 2013 performance goals.

Dozens of feds on paid leave for over a year, senator wants end to costly practice.  The alleged abuse of administrative leave policy has been most egregious at the Department of Veterans Affairs where two of the officials whose actions touched off the VA scandal last year have been on paid leave for the last 18 months.  They're not alone — of the nearly 6,000 VA employees put on administrative leave between 2011 and 2013, 46 individuals have been paid not to work for more than a year.  Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, is pressing for answers.

VA Officials Refuse To Appear Before Committee, Get Hit With Subpoena.  The House Veterans' Affairs Committee (HVAC) held a hearing Wednesday [10/21/2015] to get to the bottom of an inspector general report which found that senior officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs engaged in a scheme to cash in on relocation bonuses at the expense of taxpayers.  The only problem is that every single VA official or employee named to appear skipped the meeting.  Undersecretary for Benefits Allison Hickey resigned ahead of the hearing to avoid coming before the committee.

Los Angeles VA shredded veterans' claims instead of processing them, IG report says.  The Los Angeles VA shredded veterans' benefit claims without ever processing them, the department's inspector general said in a report Tuesday [8/18/2015] that suggests the problems exposed last year continue.  Investigators auditing the Los Angeles office of the Veterans Administration found eight benefits claims that were designated for shredding, instead of being processed and entered into the agency's electronic system.

VA caught sending veterans' mail to the shredder.  The government watchdog for the Department of Veterans Affairs reported Monday [8/17/2015] that it was able to substantiate claims that the VA's Los Angeles office was sending mail from veterans to the shredder.  The VA's Office of Inspector General said it launched an "unannounced inspection" of the Los Angeles office after hearing allegations that the VA staff there was shredding mail related to veterans' disability compensation claims.  Though the OIG said it can't measure how often this might have happened, it did say it found some examples of mail lined up for the shredder that instead should have been opened and read.

35,000 Combat Vets Being Denied Health Care Because Of VA Computer Error.  An error in the Department of Veterans Affairs computer system is responsible for over 35,000 combat veterans being placed in limbo on a health care enrollment list.  The VA system requires veterans to complete a questionnaire detailing household income in order to be considered for healthcare enrollment.  But that policy is not supposed to apply to combat veterans, who instead should be receiving five years of free care.  Still, the system doesn't appear advanced enough to differentiate between combat and non-combat veterans, meaning that 35,093 veterans are pending enrollment for care when they shouldn't even be on the wait list.

1,000 VA workers facing disciplinary action, McDonald says.  In an interview with the CBS News program "60 Minutes," [VA Secretary Robert] McDonald said the VA is taking "aggressive, expeditious disciplinary action, consistent with the law" against more than 1,000 of its 315,000 employees.

Image Shows VA Psychiatrist On Facebook Telling Veteran To Commit Suicide.  An image posted online Monday night [7/27/2015] apparently shows a Department of Veterans Affairs psychiatrist telling a veteran to commit suicide.  The image was uploaded to Imgur and shows an anonymous veteran indicating support for gun rights on a Facebook comment thread.  In response, Gregg Gorton, whose Facebook profile shows that he works at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center as a staff psychiatrist, said that the user should commit suicide.  "[O]ff yourself, please," Gorton said in response to the veteran.  Another Facebook user jumped into the conversation shortly after Gorton's comment, saying, "is that what you say to pro gun Veterans at the VA?"

VA whistleblowers, punished for revealing excessive opiate use and infestation, are finally exonerated.  The employees, who shared harrowing experiences with investigators of being ostracized, harassed and punished for reporting their concerns about mismanagement, have plenty of company.  The special counsel's office says it has helped more than 45 whistleblowers with claims of retaliation by VA in the last two years, by getting their jobs back and, in some cases, securing compensatory damages.

How more than 150 headstones for veterans' graves were plundered to build the floor of a carport.  When headstones on the graves of fallen servicemen crack or fade with age, they're hauled away to be honorably destroyed. Then the Department of Veterans Affairs replaces them.  But at a veterans cemetery in Rhode Island, an employee who was supposed to be taking care of the graves pillaged more than 150 granite headstones, many of them still inscribed with the names of the veterans.  Then he took the markers home to build a floor for his carport. [...] Two of Maynard's co-workers turned him in to the Rhode Island State Police, court documents show.  The employees told investigators for the police and VA's inspector general that he bragged about stealing the gravestones and using them at his home.

VA to Iraq war vet: 'We're not accepting any new patients'.  Iraq war veteran Chris Dorsey figured that no one would believe he had been turned away from a U.S. Department of Veteran's Affairs clinic when he sought an appointment for post-traumatic stress disorder. [...] The response?  "We're not accepting any new patients — not this clinic," the VA employee behind the desk says, without providing any extra information, assistance or guidance for treatment.

'Cash Strapped' VA Forgot It Had $43.1 Million Stashed Away.  When not pleading poverty, the Department of Veterans Affairs can be awfully careless with its money.  The latest example:  In 2011, the VA set $43.1 million aside to produce brochures informing veterans about their benefits, then forgot about it.  The money went unspent for three years and now might be lost for good.  An internal audit released earlier this month said, "A breakdown of VA fiscal controls and a lack of oversight led to the parking of funds ... and the failure to detect and properly use and manage these funds."  That breakdown in fiscal controls seems to be endemic at the VA.

The Veterans Administration aims for a fresh betrayal.  Instead of cleaning up its act, the VA's trying once again to sabotage the Choice program, which was supposed to allow vets to see a doctor outside the delay-plagued VA system.  On Thursday [6/25/2015], VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson will ask Congress for permission to raid the $10 billion Choice fund and spend the money elsewhere.  It's an underhanded betrayal, but sadly, it's no surprise.

Cash for Slackers, Part II.  For example, not only was Janice Perry allowed to work on union issues 100% of the time at her job at Veterans Affairs, she didn't even want to occasionally show up at work, writes Patrick Pizzella, one of the three federal officials adjudicating federal union fights at the Federal Labor Relations Authority.  Perry, an AFL-CIO president, has been working on union duties full-time while at the VA Medical Center in Martinsburg, West Virginia.  After she broke her ankle, Perry demanded she be allowed to work from home, solely on union duties, five days a week, every week.  The VA then offered her the option to work three days each week from home, still solely on union duties.

Billions of Dollars 'Making Mockery' of Federal Law and Taxpayers at VA.  A federal whistleblower has revealed that the Veterans Health Administration may have improperly spent up to $5 billion in improper and unauthorized procurement expenditures over each of the last five years and lawmakers are demanding an explanation.  An internal Department of Veterans Affairs memo determined that the agency violated federal contracting rules to pay for medical care and supplies.  The communique, addressed to VA Secretary Robert McDonald and written by Deputy Assistant Secretary Jan Frye, asserts that the VA "has and continues to waste millions of dollars by paying excessive prices for goods and services due to breaches in federal law."

Doctors seen as "complicit" in costly abuse of military health benefit system.  Marketers peddling pain and scar creams directly to military personnel are costing the Pentagon hundreds of millions of dollars a month, according to Major General Richard Thomas.  Thomas, who oversees TRICARE, the military's health benefit system, says doctors are complicit in the process.  "They're getting providers, doctors or whomever to write scripts, fill in scripts without even seeing the patient," said Thomas.

More VA cover-ups.  It should be quite clear by now that the bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs needs a drastic purge.  Its perfidy became obvious about a year ago when Americans learned that various officials had been gaming the system in order to preserve their own performance bonuses and give the appearance that veterans were getting timely care.  The practice was widespread and many were complicit as veterans died and suffered in silence without the medical treatment they were promised.  Since then, a great many other problems in the agency have been revealed, including cover-ups of lethal infections at VA facilities, hospitals that consume resources and serve no patients, and pill mills.

VA Official Grilled In House Hearing Over $300K Relocation Incentive.  A House Veterans' Affairs Committee hearing was the scene of a tense exchange Wednesday as a top-ranking VA official was forced to answer questions about a $300,000 relocation package the agency gave her to take a job in Philadelphia last year.  Committee chairman Jeff Miller, a Florida Republican, grilled Diana Rubens, the current director of the Philadelphia VA Regional Benefits Office, about whether such a large payment was needed to incentivize her to move the 140 miles from Washington D.C. to Philadelphia.

VA manager forced underlings to pay his wife $30 for fortune telling.  In a voice choked with emotion, Rustyann Brown told lawmakers Wednesday [4/22/2015] how the Department of Veterans Affairs routinely turned its back on veterans and their families, even in death.  Mrs. Brown, a former employee in the VA's Oakland office, was assigned one day in 2012 to a special team given the job of reviewing more than 13,000 veterans' claims dating back to the mid-1990s that had never been addressed.  As they sorted through the mounds of papers, she said, they often discovered that the veterans had long since died without receiving the requested benefits.

VA Sends Veterans' Medical Info To FBI To Get Their Guns Taken Away.  Documents obtained by The Daily Caller and interviews with American veterans reveal a shocking government program:  The Department of Veterans Affairs is disarming America's veterans by getting them placed on the FBI's criminal background-check list.  The VA sends veterans' personal medical and financial information directly to the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which can seize their guns in home raids.

New VA scandals call into question agency's ability to clean house.  Nearly a year after a scandal rocked the Department of Veterans Affairs, revealing that the agency's centers nationwide were manipulating records to hide dangerously long patient wait times, the bad news just keeps on coming — calling into question the agency's promise to clean house.

Grassley to Holder: Why Is The VA Putting So Many Veterans on Your Federal Gun Ban List?  Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder expressing deep concerns over Veterans Affairs evaluations classifying veterans as "mentally defective" and banning them in the federal background check system from purchasing or owning a firearm.  According to Grassley's office, the VA "reports individuals to the gun ban list if an individual merely needs financial assistance managing VA benefits," keeping them from exercising their Second Amendment rights.

VA inspector general investigating Philadelphia official's relocation bonus.  The Department of Veterans Affairs' Office of Inspector General is investigating the nearly $300,000 relocation bonus paid to a senior VA official when she was transferred from Washington to lead the Philadelphia regional office last year.  In a letter to House Veterans Affairs Chairman Jeff Miller, Deputy Inspector General Richard Griffin said his office is "reviewing the documentation" of the $288,206 in payments to Philadelphia VA Director Diana Rubens.  She received about $250,000 more than than the average relocation expense normally paid to VA officials.

VA employee used doll photos to mock veterans' mental problems in email.  A social worker at an Indianapolis Veteran Affairs clinic was disciplined earlier this year after sending emails to colleagues that contained photos of an elf figurine posed to mock the mental health problems of combat veterans.  Robin Paul, who manages the Roudebush Veteran Affairs Medical Center's Seamless Transition Integrated Care Clinic, on Dec. 18 sent an email with photos showing an elf pleading for Xanax and hanging himself with an electrical cord, according to The Indianapolis Star, which broke the story.

The VA secretary should know the importance of not lying about one's service — right?.  Surely there is no one who should better understand how offensive it is to lie about one's military service than the secretary of Veterans Affairs.  Yet that's exactly what Robert McDonald did the night he participated in the Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count in January.

When a Republican does this, it's called lying.
Headline writers struggle to characterize VA director's special forces fabrication.  A majority of headlines this week have characterized Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald's claim that he served in the Army's Special Forces as a "misstatement" and a "false claim."  Very few have referred to his admitted fabrication as a "lie."  McDonald, who qualified but never served as a Ranger and did not serve in Special Forces, apologized this week for the falsehood.  Headlines from the Huffington Post, the Washington Free Beacon, the Washington Examiner, the Hill and Military Times have used variations of "falsely claimed" in headlines regarding McDonald's fabrication.

Veterans remain angry even after VA secretary confesses "misstatement".  The man brought in to restore credibility to the Department of Veterans Affairs had some explaining of his own to do Tuesday [2/24/2015].  Secretary Robert McDonald corrected a misstatement that he made last month on the CBS Evening News about his own military record after the statement was questioned by several retired officers.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin Lawyers Up After Three Deaths Are Linked To A VA Report She Sat On For Months.  Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), the first openly gay member of the U.S. Senate, may have landed herself in some trouble after it was reported her office did little to address the rather high rate of opiate prescriptions coming out of the Veterans Affairs center in Tomah, Wisconsin.  As a result, Baldwin's office fired a top aide, offered her a severance package, and a confidentiality agreement.  The aide, Marquette Baylor, rejected the deal and is considering a sexual discrimination lawsuit against Baldwin.  At the same time, Baldwin's office had the Tomah VA report since last summer.  To make matters worse, three deaths are linked to the overmedication problem highlighted in the report on the facility.

You'd think the VA is now running the FDA and the CDC.  Seven patients at UCLA Ronald Reagan medical center contracted a deadly superbug from an utterly routine medical procedure.  Two have died.  A third, an eighteen-year-old boy, fights on for his life after 83 days in the hospital, mostly in intensive care.  All this suffering was preventable.  If the CDC and the FDA had alerted UCLA and other hospitals about medical equipment they knew was contaminated, patients would not have been put at risk.  The agencies had already watched the same lethal problem unfold in Chicago, Seattle, and elsewhere but they swept it under the rug.

VA secretary sorry for false special forces claim.  Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald has apologized for making false claims about having served in the the U.S. military's elite specials operations forces, the latest scandal to hit the besieged department.

VA Secretary Robert McDonald reportedly admits lying about Special Forces service.  Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald has admitted that he lied about serving in the special operations forces in a conversation with a homeless veteran that was caught on camera earlier this year.  McDonald made the claim in January while he was in Los Angeles as part of the VA's effort to locate and house homeless veterans.  During the tour, a homeless man told McDonald that he had served in the special operations forces.

VA 'I CARE' slogan slammed by veterans, employees as mockery of reform.  The embattled Veterans Affairs Department, now ranked by a government watchdog as among the most troubled federal agencies, is reminding employees in a memo why they should care about their work.

Vets lose L.A. golf tournament tickets after VA cancels parking deal.  With free grounds passes, concert tickets and refreshments at the "Patriots' Outpost," veterans and their families could expect a grand time at the PGA's Northern Trust Open golf tournament in Pacific Palisades next month.  But after the Department of Veterans Affairs, in the midst of a legal dispute, canceled event parking at its West Los Angeles campus, tournament officials asked the agency to return 2,000 tickets it had donated for veterans.

Records: Phoenix VA chief Helman took gifts in secret.  As Arizona military veterans waited months for doctor appointments in a broken health-care system, then-Phoenix VA hospital Director Sharon Helman went on a weeklong vacation to Disneyland secretly financed by an industry lobbyist, according to an administrative-law judge and documents obtained by The Arizona Republic.  E-mail records and receipts examined by Chief Administrative Judge Stephen C. Mish indicate that Helman also got free concert and airline tickets and other perks from lobbyist Dennis "Max" Lewis, her previous boss.  Based on that revelation, Mish on Monday upheld Helman's firing by the VA and rejected her appeal.

Bradley Stone cleared by Veterans Affairs doctor one week before murders, suicide.  A Department of Veterans Affairs psychiatrist cleared former Marine Bradley Stone of suicidal or homicidal tendencies just a week before he went on a killing spree, slaying six others and then taking his own life.

VA's 5-day firing notice too long for Congress, too short for lawyers.  The Department of Veterans Affairs and Congress are battling over whether the VA is firing employees fast enough as part of a major management overhaul, but legal analysts say even the five-day notice the administration has settled on is too short and employees who have been fired could sue to get their jobs back — with taxpayers on the hook for back pay.  Veterans Affairs officials said they came up with the five-day notice based on the advice of their attorneys, though members of Congress said even that was too long because it gives targeted employees a chance to retire and collect lifetime benefits.

Veterans Affairs Keeps Buying Bogus And Counterfeit Medical Equipment.  Internal correspondence between the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and a major supplier of medical devices reveals that the VA has been buying bogus and counterfeit medical equipment, The Washington Times reports.  The equipment comes from the so-called gray market and threatens to endanger patient's lives.  Johnson & Johnson brought the matter to the VA's attention and placed the blame on procurement rules.

Embattled Veterans Affairs procurement official abruptly resigns.  The high-level procurement official at the Department of Veterans Affairs slammed for leaking inside information to a private contractor retired from the agency Tuesday [10/14/2014], the Washington Examiner has learned.  Susan Taylor, the subject of a scathing inspector general's report issued Sept. 26, had been targeted for firing by VA officials.  She is one of four senior executives the agency was trying to oust under the provisions of a new law, signed in August by President Obama, that enhanced the power of the VA secretary to discipline members of the Senior Executive Service for misconduct or poor performance.

Top VA Official Conspired With Her Married Boyfriend To Thwart Investigations.  A recent investigation has uncovered a shocking tale of corruption and adultery at the Department of Veterans Affairs.  Susan Taylor, a longtime federal employee and Deputy Chief Procurement Officer at the Veterans Health Administration since 2010, not only used her position to award government contracts to a former business partner, and worked with said company to hide the thousands and thousands of dollars it was making off the government, but conspired with her married boyfriend — who also had close personal ties to the company — to thwart investigations into her misconduct.

Top VA officials steered contracts to firm, investigation finds.  The VA's inspector general said in a scathing report that Susan M. Taylor, deputy chief procurement officer for the Veterans Health Administration, "continually" lied about her dealings with FedBid, the well-connected reverse auction company whose advisers and employees include two former top White House procurement officials, a general and a former congressman.

VA Supervisor Made Her Employees Renovate Her House, Used Gov't Money To Do It.  From 2010 to 2013, 48-year-old Venita Godfrey-Scott directed her employees to use materials and supplies intended for VA medical center upkeep on her own house.  These taxpayer-funded home improvement projects included "a deck in her backyard, carpet installation, and various kitchen, bathroom and basement improvements."  She also instructed employees to buy other necessary materials with her government-issued credit card, and had them work on these projects during normal work hours, when they were being paid by the VA.

Permanent new boss requested for Phoenix VA.  Arizona's entire congressional delegation sent a letter Thursday [9/11/2014] to Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald urging him to name a permanent leader of the Phoenix VA medical center to replace Director Sharon Helman even though she remains on the agency's payroll.  The letter, unusual in its bipartisan consensus, notes that two temporary bosses have overseen the beleaguered Phoenix VA Health Care System since Helman was placed on leave May 1 amid allegations of fraud and mismanagement.  A third fill-in is expected in November.

VA Employees Arrested For Running Coke Ring Out Of VA Medical Center.  Robert Tucker and Erik Casiano had been using the U.S. Postal Service and the mailroom of a VA Medical Center in the Bronx to receive and distribute cocaine since "at least November 2013," according to the press release.  Tucker has worked for the VA since 1997, and in 2012 was promoted to supervisor of the Logistics Warehouse and Mail Center. Casiano, a pipefitter in the plumbing department, had worked for the center since 2012.  All told, the two attempted to distribute over 5 kilograms of cocaine.  If found guilty, they each face a minimum of 10 years in prison, and could be jailed for life.

Braley under fire for missing VA oversight meetings.  Over a two-year period, Democratic U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley missed 75 percent of meetings for a committee that provides oversight over the Veterans Administration, including one meeting on a day he attended three fundraisers for his 2012 campaign.  A few months later, news reports exposed systemic problems in patient care that have since resulted in the resignation head of the federal department of veterans affairs.  Republicans argue that Braley, who missed 15 of the 20 Veterans' Affairs Committee meetings in 2011 and 2012, has shown a lack of commitment to conditions within the health care system for veterans.

Whistleblower: VA Neglected Care to Focus on ObamaCare Promotion.  On Wednesday's "Your World with Neil Cavuto," Scott Davis, a whistleblower who works as a Program Specialist at the VA's Health Eligibility Center stated that "focus our attention to applications based on specific campaigns," including ObamaCare.  Davis said "there's so much pressure on the employees to get stuff done so that management can meet goals, it's easy to make mistakes, it's easy to have mishaps," and employees often "rush through the application process to hit goals for members of management."

18,709 VA Employees Make $180,000 or More.  The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has 59,297 employees — 17.3 percent out of 342,089 workers total — that make $100,000 or more in yearly salary, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Among those employees, 18,709 of them earn a salary of $180,000 or more.

VA investigates Atlanta enrollment office.  Federal investigators are examining allegations that thousands of veterans who applied for health care benefits had their applications purged improperly by the national Veterans Affairs enrollment eligibility office based in Atlanta, according to VA employees interviewed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Vets: VA's Care of Veterans Impeded by Filming of TV Series, Conference.  Dr. Roy Marokus, who currently serves in private practice, told the Free Beacon that veterans were denied care because of a mandatory conference he attended last March.  Marokus said veterans' appointments were cancelled so VA medical providers could attend the two-day conference.  Medical providers at the VA Medical Center in Oklahoma City, where Marokus briefly worked, and providers at all other VA medical centers in the Veterans Integrated Services Network, attended the conference.  A review of the paperwork handed out during the conference showed topics included advice on how to plan a party and asked the medical staff to explore, "What Color is Your Personality?"

Every Senior V.A. Executive Was Rated 'Fully Successful' or Better Over 4 Years.  All of the 470 senior executives at the Department of Veterans Affairs received annual ratings over the last four years indicating that they were "fully successful" in their jobs or even better, according to data released at a congressional hearing on Friday, despite delays in processing disability compensation claims and problems with veterans' access to the department's sprawling health care system.

The VA Sacrificed Vets for Solar Panels.  The VA Scandal began at the Phoenix VA Health Care System where administrators earned promotions and bonuses by shunting patients who needed treatment into fake waiting lists.  As many as 40 veterans had died while waiting for care and 1,715 veterans in the Phoenix VA Health Care System had waited more than 90 days for an appointment.  A retired Navy serviceman died of bladder cancer after being put on a 7-month waiting list after blood was found in his urine.  He finally received an appointment a week after his death.  But each and every year, from 2009 to 2011, the Phoenix VA Health Care System put in solar panels.  The solar panels at the Carl T. Hayden VA in Phoenix cost $20 million.

Fresno VA Hospital Blocks Fox News Channel From Waiting Room Television.  Veterans are outraged after a KMPH FOX 26 News investigation reveals the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Fresno was caught blocking the "Fox News Channel" from a hospital waiting room.  Is it a mistake or something more?  Veteran Bob McLaughlin says, "It was just beyond amazement because I know Fox News has been pretty heavy on any of the government things coming out, especially the Veteran Affairs Hospital scandal."  McLaughlin says he went to the hospital to check it out for himself.

Family: V.A. Cops Stomped On Veteran's Head, Killing Him.  The family of a 65 year-old veteran claims that VA police stomped on the veterans head and neck, causing him to suffer a stroke and die several weeks later, a new lawsuit alleges.  On May 25, 2011, Jonathan Montano was waiting several hours to undergo dialysis treatment at the Loma Linda VA facility when he grew frustrated, reports Courthouse News Service.  With an IV still in his arm, Montano made his way towards the hospital exit, saying that he would get treatment at the Long Beach VA facility instead.

VA Chaplain: Gov't Made Me Hide Crosses and Pictures of Jesus, Banned Me From Reading Bible Aloud.  In the wake of the ever-growing VA scandal, actions at the Iron Mountain VA Hospital in Michigan may not have gotten quite as much press as many feel they should.  Patsy Norton, when walking into Iron Mountain's VA chapel, was appalled to find every sign of Christianity hidden from sight. [...] The repression of Christianity isn't limited to Iron Mountain, but has been reported in VA facilities all over the country.

VA hospital hides Jesus behind curtain.  Some folks in Iron Mountain became infuriated earlier this month when they discovered that statues of Jesus and Mary, along with a cross and altar, were hidden behind a curtain in the chapel of the VA hospital there.  The chapel still has stained glass windows, though for how long is unclear.  A VA hospital spokesman told me they are still trying to figure out what to do with the windows.  The decision to hide the religious icons came after the National Chaplain Center conducted an on-site inspection and determined the hospital's chapel was not in compliance with government regulations.
[Emphasis added.]

Despite lie about degree, VA exec still oversees network of health care centers.  The director of VA's Sierra Pacific Network, Sheila M. Cullen falsely claimed in "numerous official documents" that Bernard M. Baruch College-Mount Sinai School of Medicine awarded her a master's degree she never earned, according to a memo by the VA inspector general's office.  VA officials refuse to say what, if any, punishment Ms. Cullen faced.

VA Spends Close to $500 Million on Conference Room, Office Makeovers Under Obama.  President Barack Obama has increased the Department of Veterans Affairs' budget each year since he took office, claiming the funds would give veterans the health care they deserve.  However, an analysis of records show the agency has spent close to $500 million on office furniture under the Obama administration.  This upcoming fiscal year Obama requested a 3 percent increase for the Veterans Affairs budget.  Obama's FY 2015 budget request points out he has increased the VA discretionary budget by 35.2 percent since 2009 so veterans continue to access necessary services.

VA hospital backs down after slapping man with $525 fine over soda refill.  The VA hospital that slapped a $525 federal fine on a man after he refilled his 89-cent drink without paying has backed down, choosing to issue a warning instead of a citation, a spokesperson for the facility said Thursday [4/17/2014].  Christopher T. Lewis, of North Charleston, was issued the $525 citation on Wednesday after he ignored signage indicating that there's no such thing as a free lunch — or complimentary drink refills — at the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center in Charleston.  Lewis, who is not a federal employee, told responding officers he had done the same thing "multiple times" before and never had any problems, hospital spokeswoman Tonya Lobbestael told FoxNews.com.

Veterans Affairs wind turbine, built for $2.3 million, stands dormant.  A $2.3 million federal stimulus project at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in St. Cloud is giving green energy initiatives a bad name.  A 600-kilowatt wind turbine — some 245 foot [sic] tall — stands on the wintry VA grounds, frozen in time and temperature, essentially inoperable for the past 1½ years.  No one is working to fix it, though many attempts were made to repair the turbine, once billed as a model green energy project.

$2.3M Wind Turbine at Veterans Affairs Medical Center 'Inoperable' for Last 1½ Years.  A wind turbine at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in St. Cloud, Minnesota paid for with $2.3 million in federal stimulus funds has been "inoperable" for one and half years.  According to Fox News, the "600-kilowatt wind turbine — some 245 foot [sic] tall — stands... frozen" and no one is even trying to fix it.

Former Dept. of Veterans Affairs chief pleads the Fifth.  A former assistant secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs pleaded the Fifth on Wednesday [10/30/2013], refusing to testify about a pair of taxpayer-funded human resources conferences in 2011 that cost a scandalous $6.1 million or more.  John Sepulveda oversaw the conferences, which included the screening of a parody video based on 'Patton,' whose production cost the Treasury more than $52,000.  But in front of the House Oversight Committee, he chose to remain silent, [...]

Audit: Workers at costly Veterans Affairs job center took average of 2 calls a day.  The Veterans Affairs Department is spending millions on employment call centers where workers have handled as few as one or two calls a day ever since the facilities opened in October 2011, according to a recent inspector general report.  The two centers are operated and staffed by a private contractor and were opened to increase the number of veterans working for the department.

Department of Veterans Affairs employees destroyed veterans' medical records to cancel backlogged exam requests.  Employees of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) destroyed veterans' medical files in a systematic attempt to eliminate backlogged veteran medical exam requests, a former VA employee told The Daily Caller.  Audio of an internal VA meeting obtained by TheDC confirms that VA officials in Los Angeles intentionally canceled backlogged patient exam requests.

Obama administration knew that veterans' personal info was at risk, security programs violated federal law.  The Obama administration's Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) knew that a breach of veterans' personal information was "practically unavoidable" months before it happened in January, according to an internal VA risk assessment that also said the department's security programs are "non-compliant" with three federal laws.

V.A. to Provide Spousal Benefits to Gays, Administration Says.  The Obama administration on Wednesday [9/4/2013] escalated its effort to dismantle federal barriers to same-sex marriages, announcing that the Department of Veterans Affairs would immediately begin providing spousal benefits to gay men and lesbians despite a federal statute that limits such benefits to veterans' spouses who are "of the opposite sex."

Lawsuit: Chaplains Banned From Saying "Jesus".  Two Baptist chaplains said they were forced out of a Veterans Affairs chaplain training program after they refused orders to stop quoting the Bible and to stop praying in the name of Jesus.  When the men objected to those demands they were subjected to ridicule and harassment that led to one of the chaplains leaving the program and the other being ejected, according to a federal lawsuit filed Friday [11/8/2013].

The Editor says...
Are there similar restrictions against Islamic, Hindu, Wiccan, or earth-worshiping eco-fruitcake prayers?  What if one of the chaplains prays directly to Barack H. Obama?  Would there be a reprimand or a promotion?

The VA Death Panel

Related topic:  Rationing and Death Panels Under Obamacare.