Category: Veterans’ Affairs Department

Bobo sends us a link to WANE which reports that the VA Northern Indiana Health Care System in Fort Wayne removed five service flags so they could fly a gay pride rainbow flag at their facility.

The sight drew plenty of attention from residents and visitors to the VA. NewsChannel 15 received several questions and comments and photos from viewers.

The VA Northern Indiana Healthcare System issued the following statement:
“Logistically, we could not add a flag without removing a flag from the poles outside our VA. Rather than single out one military branch’s flag to be temporarily replaced with the LGBT flag, we chose to remove all of them for one day in order to show our dedication to serving all Veterans equally.”
The VA said service flags were put back up before the end of the business day.

Christopher Wilson, a veteran who who was being treated at Salt Lake City VA Medical Center took pictures of the examination room which his father sent out in a Tweet;

My son is a Veteran of the United States Army. He went to the #VA in Salt Lake City yesterday. This was the condition of the room he was seen in. Very unprofessional, unsanitary and disrespectful. Please retweet. Maybe @realDonaldTrump will see it. pic.twitter.com/P4CMQeE74t

— Stephen Wilson (@GR8_2B_alive) April 27, 2018

The hospital has apologized, according to Tucson News;

Dr. Karen Gribbin, the chief of staff at the Salt Lake VA, has apologized to Wilson and is investigating why the room was a mess.

“I was taken aback by the condition of the room. The patient, Mr. Wilson, should not have been placed in the room in that condition,” Gribbin said.

Gribbin calls the incident a rare event but intends to review procedures with staff.

“I do not want another veteran to experience this,” she said.

Wilson believes his experience highlights a problem across the VA.

“I’m sure you could ask 1,000 different veterans, and each one of them will have their own story,” he said. “It’s frustrating. I mean, I go to another hospital’s emergency room… [and] it’s such a different experience. They seem to actually care about getting you the care you need.”

These are regional problems – whenever I go to VA facilities, I’ve never seen the place like it is in the photos.

Thanks to Eggs for the link.

The Washington Post reports that Albert S. Poawui pleaded guilty in court this week to defrauding the Veterans’ Affairs Department of about $2.2 million in kickbacks;

In 2015, Poawui and a vocational counselor at VA agreed Poawui would pay the official a 7 percent cash kickback for VA payments to Atius, ostensibly for vocational training for disabled veterans, the statement said.

Between 2015 and 2017, VA paid Atius more than $2.2 million, according to the statement, for inflated invoices that showed veterans attending classes for 32 hours per week when the program offered only six hours weekly.

From the Justice Department;

Poawui admitted that the counselor and a second [Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment (VR&E) program] counselor approved payments to Atius without regard for the accuracy of necessary documentation in order to maximize the scheme’s profits. Between August 2015 and December 2017, Poawui and the scheme’s other participants caused the VA to pay Atius approximately $2,217,259.44. Poawui paid the first VR&E counselor over $155,000 as part of the illicit bribery scheme. These bribery payments were hand-delivered by Poawui or an Atius employee to the VR&E counselor or the counselor’s assistant, a veteran who was enrolled in the VR&E program.

Poawui also admitted that, with the knowing assistance of a second Atius employee, he made numerous false representations to the VA to enhance the scheme’s profits. For example, Poawui and the second employee certified to the VA that veterans attending Atius were enrolled in up to 32 hours of class per week, when in fact both knew that Atius offered a maximum of six weekly class hours. After the VA initiated an administrative audit of Atius, Poawui, the VR&E counselor and the Atius employee took steps to conceal the truth about earlier misrepresentations they had made to the VA.

According to Military Times, Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin was fired by President Trump and he’s to be replaced by Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson who has been the personal physician of the past three Presidents, after he completed a tour of Iraq at the peak of hostilities in that war.

His bio says that Jackson specialized in Undersea medicine;

After completing his first year of residency training in 1996, he went on to become the honor graduate of the Navy’s Undersea Medical Officer Program in Groton, Connecticut. Uniquely qualified in submarine and hyperbaric medicine, his subsequent operational assignments included, instructor at the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center in Panama City, Florida; det. officer in charge and diving medical officer at Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit 8 in Sigonella, Italy; and diving safety officer at the Naval Safety Center in Norfolk.

In 2001, Jackson returned to Portsmouth Naval Medical Center to begin his residency in emergency medicine, finishing at the top of his class and receiving the honor graduate designation. Upon completing his residency in 2004, he was assigned as clinical faculty in the Emergency Medicine Residency Program at the Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, Virginia. In 2005 he joined the 2nd Marines, Combat Logistics Regiment 25, in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. From there he deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom as the emergency medicine physician in charge of resuscitative medicine for a forward deployed Surgical Shock Trauma Platoon in Taqaddum, Iraq.

He’s certainly qualified as a clinician, but his skill as a bureaucrat has yet to be tested.

Stars & Stripes reports that VA Chief of Staff Vivieca Wright Simpson resigned after she misled an ethics official.

VA Chief of Staff Vivieca Wright Simpson called VA Secretary David Shulkin on Friday morning and informed him she was retiring, Shulkin told Stars and Stripes. In addition to the ethical violations, her retirement comes amid reports of internal strife at the agency between a White House appointee and longtime civil servants.

Wright Simpson, the third-most senior VA leader, worked at the VA for 35 years. She served as chief of staff since Feb. 27, and was Shulkin’s top aide when he was the undersecretary of health in 2016.

Her ethics violation involved misleading about Shulkin’s wife while she accompanied the secretary on a trip to Europe;

The announcement comes two days after VA Inspector General Michael Missal released a report detailing “serious derelictions” by VA personnel regarding a 10-day trip to Copenhagen and London, which included full days of leisure activities and cost taxpayers at least $122,000.

Investigators found Shulkin improperly accepted Wimbledon tickets, and they alleged Wright Simpson changed an email to an ethics official to justify using taxpayer dollars to pay travel expenses for Shulkin’s wife, Dr. Merle Bari. She “willfully and knowingly” made false statements, the report says.

Shulkin repaid taxpayers $4,312 for his wife’s travel expenses.

The case was referred to the Justice Department where they declined to prosecute the criminal charges. The article is headlined to clearly misrepresent that Wright Simpson resigned, but she merely took an unscheduled retirement.

Thanks to Devtun for the link.

Another Pat sends us a link from MetroNews which reports that the Huntington, West Virginia VA Medical Center was scheduled to get a new director, Doug Paxton, an Oregon VA director who was being transferred because of some controversy at the Roseburg VA facility.

According to the New York Times, Paxton was denying treatment for veterans against doctor recommendations in order to improve “quality of care ratings” of the Roseburg facility. For example;

An 81-year-old veteran hobbled into the emergency room at the rural Veterans Affairs hospital here in December, malnourished and dehydrated, his skin flecked with ulcers and his ribs broken from a fall at home.

A doctor examining the veteran — a 20-year Air Force mechanic named Walter Savage who had been living alone — decided he was in no shape to care for himself and should be admitted to the hospital. A second doctor running the inpatient ward agreed.

But the hospital administration said no.

Though there were plenty of empty beds, records show that a nurse in charge of enforcing administration restrictions said Mr. Savage was not sick enough to qualify for admission to the hospital. He waited nine hours in the emergency room until, finally, he was sent home.

“The doctors were mad; the nurses were mad,” said Mr. Savage’s son-in-law, Mark Ridimann. “And my dad, he was mad, too. He kept saying, ‘I’ve laid my life on the line, two years in Vietnam, and this is what I get?’”

The denial appeared to be part of an attempt by members of the Roseburg Veterans Administration Medical Center to limit the number of patients it admitted to the hospital in an effort to lift its quality-of-care ratings.

So, the VA decided to move Paxton to Huntington, I guess to hide him away. That’s when the mayor of Charleston, West Virginia, Danny Jones, contacted Senator Joe Manchin who stopped Paxton’s assignment.

Manchin confirmed Monday on the mayor’s show “580 Live” on MetroNews affiliate 580-WCHS that Paxton will not be transferred to the Huntington facility.

“I don’t know where he’s going or if they’re reviewing, but he’s not coming to West Virginia,” Manchin said.

I still won’t vote for Manchin in the Fall, but he did good on this one.