Category: Veterans’ Affairs Department

Bobo sends us a link to the Washington Post in regards to the indictment of Cathedral Henderson, the Departmental Chief of Purchase Care at the VA’s Augusta facility;

Henderson, 50, was…coordinating medical care for veterans that VA could not offer. He was responsible for ensuring that more than 2,700 veterans awaiting approval for care outside the system were properly referred to for doctor’s appointments.

Someone told Henderson to close out requests for care outside of the VA system, and he took that to mean that his employees should alter patient records to reflect that they had either opted out of the program or had completed services offered to them.

Each of the charges against Henderson refers to a veteran with a pending need for medical care: Two patients were waiting for imaging, one for an ultrasound, one for neurology, another for surgery and 45 more for mammograms, according to prosecutors.

[…]

His attorney,Keith B. Johnson of Augusta, told The Augusta Chronicle that his client “was following the directive of his supervisors, and that will come out in court documents.”

While I’m not positive that Henderson was told directly by his superiors to alter veterans’ records, I am sure that he thought it would be an acceptable solution and that is part of the problem at the VA – it’s a part of the bureaucratic culture in the agency. Even if he was told directly to alter veterans’ records, he knew it was wrong and should have ignored the orders, or become a whistleblower. But, you know, he had a 20 year career to worry about which is more important than a few veterans’ preventative care.

Bobo sends us a link to the Military Times which reports that the Veterans’ Affairs Office of the Inspector General investigators found some veterans’ claims in the shedder bin at a Los Angeles office. Some lawmakers are asking for an explanation, and, of course, VA officials are downplaying the incident;

VA officials said only 10 files were misplaced in the bins, and the items would have been subject to additional review before being destroyed. They downplayed the problem as a one-time mistake from a small number of workers, not “malicious intent.”

Full details of the findings won’t be released for several more weeks, and the exact number of cases affected has not yet been released by the VA Inspector General’s Office.

But [Representative Julia Brownley, D-Calif.] and Rep. Raul Ruiz, D-Calif., have called for hearings and an immediate review of how the regional office handles documents.

“Only 10”? Um, those are the lives of ten people, even if that’s all that were affected. “Only one” would be too many. These “only ten” are counting on the government to do what they promised for us when we joined and wrote those blank checks on our lives.

VA leaders in recent years have placed extra emphasis on digitizing those records, in part to prevent that kind of loss.

The lawmakers did not say how many veterans may have been affected by the latest problem.

Yeah, at least if the records are digitized, we can get back up copies from the Chinese.

Trust us VA, we’re dying as fast as we can in order to alleviate the back log problem. You just have to have a little patience with us.

Something else that won’t surprise you; the VA wants to close some hospitals and raid Veterans Choice Program funds to close a $2.5 billion shortfall in the budget this year, well, unless Congress can send them some money-love, according to the Associated Press;

The VA said it wants authority to use up to $3 billion from the new Veterans Choice program to close the budget gap, with as much as $500 million going to treat hepatitis C. A single pill for the liver-wasting viral infection can cost up to $1,000.

The Choice program, the centerpiece of a VA overhaul approved last year, makes it easier for veterans to receive federally paid medical care from local doctors. Congress approved $10 billion over three years for the Choice program as it responded to a scandal over long waits for veterans seeking medical care and falsified records to cover up the delays.

Deputy VA Secretary Sloan Gibson told Congress that VA health care sites experienced a 10.5 percent increase in workload for the one-year period since the scandal erupted in April 2014.

It’s kind of funny (funny queer, not funny ha-ha) how, no matter how much money Congress throws at the VA, they always seem to run out. Unless there’s a training conference in Hawaii – there’s always money for that. I’m sure there are some funds laying around that was supposed to tell vets about the Choice program that they never got around to spending, because I get to field questions about it nearly every day.

According to The Hill, they’re already saving money because a third of veterans on waiting lists are already dead, so they’ve got that going for them;

A review of veteran death records provided to the Huffington Post found that, as of April, 847,822 veterans were awaiting healthcare and that of those, 238,647 were already deceased.

The report was handed over by Scott Davis, a program specialist at the VA’s Health Eligibility Center in Atlanta

He also sent copies to the House and Senate VA panels and to the White House.

A VA spokeswoman told Huffington Post that the department can’t subtract dead applicants from the list and that some may never have completed an application but remain on the back log.

See? They’re saving money as fast as they can. If only veterans would die faster for them.

Thanks to Richard and Bobo for the links.

The Military Times tells the story of Iraq war veteran Chris Dorsey who sought to find treatment for his PTS symptoms and went from one unresponsive clinic to another in Oakwood, Georgia. He was told by the receptionist that “We’re not accepting any new patients — not this clinic.” You know, that’s a perfectly good response, given the number of veterans who are going into the system these days. What’s not acceptable is that is the end of the conversation. The receptionist should have taken the time to at least explain to Dorsey what his options are in regards to VA programs available. But that didn’t happen. A really good receptionist would have pulled him off to the side and helped him find someone who could help.

The VA last year introduced a program — VA Choice — that would allow Dorsey to see a civilian therapist, but until he spoke with a fellow veteran at a nearby veterans’ outreach group about his recent experiences at the two clinics, he’d never heard of VA Choice.

[…]

“We have some very serious geographical issues. Now we have the VA Choice card but we have doctors who won’t accept it or don’t understand it,” [Jerry Edwards who founded the non-profit North Georgia Veteran’s Outreach Center] said.

By its own admission, VA has had problems implementing VA Choice, which began last November. As of May, it had authorized appointments for roughly 50,000 veterans but had received more than a half million inquiries about the program.

Yet, the Obama Administration wants to pull the plug on Veterans’ Choice because it is under utilized by veterans – a determination that was made just a few days after I received my VA Choice card. They just wanted to go through the motions and not really provide any meaningful service.

To my larger point; the changes that need to be made at the VA isn’t among the people who actually provide the healthcare for veterans, It’s the administrators that stand between the veterans and their care that need to be booted, or at a minimum, trained to provide services instead of making excuses why they won’t do their jobs. I’m reasonably sure that the receptionist isn’t even aware of the Vets’ Choice program or how it works. In the article, Dorsey admits that he didn’t know about the program, so, I wonder why it’s under-utilized.

Bobo sends us a link to the Military Times which reports that Richard Griffin, the Inspector General of the Veterans’ Affairs Department has announced that he he is resigning. I wonder who will notice that he’s gone. Griffin’s job was to uncover fraud waste and abuse in the department, but the media and whistleblowers have been doing that job for him.

Griffin has faced harsh words from critics in recent years for not doing enough to hold VA leadership accountable for problems regarding patient wait times, overprescribing by physicians, and medical records manipulation.

On Monday, a group called VA Truth Tellers blasted Griffin for a “pattern of whitewashing and deceit” and called for his resignation. Several lawmakers have also publicly berated the office in recent months for working too closely with VA officials instead of publicly exposing potential wrongdoing.

Our buddy, Concerned Veterans for America’s Pete Hegseth had some harsh words, too;

“CVA has been calling for the removal of Richard Griffin for over eight months, and his departure is long overdue. While acting as IG, Griffin diminished the effectiveness and trustworthiness of the Office of Inspector General (OIG) by whitewashing the deaths of veterans at the Phoenix VA, withholding documents from members of Congress, and not publicly releasing IG reports that document misconduct within the VA. His politicization and mismanagement of the OIG has inhibited the ability of the office to properly uncover the true extent of misconduct throughout the VA in the aftermath of the VA wait list scandal. This is one of the reasons why just yesterday a group of VA whistleblowers called for his removal.

“CVA urges the White House to immediately nominate a permanent VA IG – something that the troubled Department has lacked for over 18 months. An independent and effective Office of Inspector General is essential to fixing the VA’s toxic culture and the future of VA reform efforts.”

Griffin has been in the job for only eighteen months. His temporary replacement, Linda Halloway has worked in the agency for 23 years, so we can expect equally unproductive and uninspired performance from her in Griffin’s wake.

The Washington Post reports that there is no accounting for about $54 million worth of purchases of prosthetic devices for veterans;

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.

According to the Post, VA officials, when first questioned about the purchases had planned on telling Congress that the records were lost in the flooding that resulted from Hurricane Sandy, until they realized that timeline wouldn’t fit the circumstances since the Congressional inquiry was about a month before the storm.

So, the VA turned to their perpetual liar-in-chief, Ric Shinseki;

The letter that finally went to Congress, signed by Shinseki, said simply:

“No contract files exist” and “there is no evidence of full and open competition” for the prosthetics bought in the Bronx.

You know, if the VA in the Bronx were doing right by veterans, I would have no problem with this, but, we’ve come to know the VA better than that. I have trouble believing that there are no records of credit card purchases. If you ask me for mine, I could pull them up in about two minutes. That’s the whole point of credit cards. And we’re talking about thousands of purchases, each for tens of thousands of dollars. How do you even lose records like that?

It’s going to take decades for the VA to recover from the influence of Ric Shinseki.

Thanks to Marine_7002 for the link.