Category: Veterans’ Affairs Department

Ric Shinseki, the secretary of the Veterans’ Affairs Department responds to the initial report from the Office of the Inspector General in the pages of USAToday. He says that he’s “committed to restoring integrity” at the Department. Well, see, he shouldn’t have to do that. If the people directly under Shinseki had been thinking of veterans first, there would be nothing to “restore” in the first place.

The findings of the interim report of VA’s Office of Inspector General on the Phoenix VA Health Care System are reprehensible to me and to this department, and we are not waiting to set things straight.

I immediately directed the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) to contact each of the 1,700 veterans in Phoenix waiting for primary care appointments in order to bring them the care they need and deserve.

I had previously directed an independent site team to comprehensively assess scheduling and administrative practices in Phoenix. This team began its work in April, and we are already taking action consistent with the recommendations of the interim inspector general’s report. We will fully implement his remaining recommendations.

It was the climate at the VA that created this problem. This didn’t happen overnight that more than 1700 veterans at one hospital were ignored. Eric Shinseki has placed his own employees ahead of the people they’ve been charged to serve. He supported the President’s plan to make service-connected veterans buy their own insurance, he absolutely failed getting the new GI Bill benefits to veterans attending college in a timely manner, he didn’t stop the VA from funding expensive parties across the country for employees, he can’t make the VA overcome the backlogs of claims and now this, the final straw, veterans waiting months for appointments for the care that they earned.

He shouldn’t have to “restore integrity” if his leadership in the agency had caused the loss of integrity in the first place.

This blog has been calling for Shinseki’s resignation for years, before anyone else recognized that he’s just an incompetent boob. Daniel sent us this video on our Facebook page last night;

Dominick sends us a link to MyFoxLA which reports that a widow is suing the Department of Veterans’ Affairs for the treatment of her husband in June 2011. Jonathan Montano waited for four hours with a shunt inserted into his arm for dialysis treatment. He decided to go to another VA hospital and sent his wife, Norma, to get the car. When she returned, she discovered that her husband has been admitted because he had a stroke;

The family claims that the police brutalized Montano, beat him and stomped on his carotid artery, giving him a stroke that killed him, and then lied to his wife about it. The hospital said Montano was beligerent and police attempted to restrain him for his safety and the safety of staff and patients. The hospital said the vet fell and hit his head. According to the widow, a staff member later informed her that her husband had been slammed to the floor by the officers.

The incident was investigated by the VA which, in December 2013, said there was “no evidence of negligence or wrongful act or omission by VA employees that resulted in injury to, or the death of, the veteran patient in June 2011. Although a terrible and unfortunate incident occurred, VA personnel acted and responded appropriately.”

I guess we’ll need to wait for the lawsuit to end to find out what really happened here. In the meantime, I’m not making any judgements.

Los Angeles Local News | FOX 11 LA KTTV

Chief Tango sends a link to the Army Times which reports that the VA admits that they have treated more than 2500 veterans for gender dysphoria, you know that disorder that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders says “that childhood issues may play a role in this disorder” meaning it’s not service-connected.

And oh, did I mention that thousands of veterans are in line to get actual problems caused by their service treated? Well, they are.

In 2013, the Veterans Affairs department treated 2,567 veterans with the diagnosis of gender dysphoria with transgender-specific care, according to Ndidi Mojay, a VA spokeswoman. The department does not have a cost estimate for the treatment, which can include male or female hormones depending on gender.

“Few transgender individuals pursue a goal of transformation to the other gender that also includes the complete set of sex reassignment surgeries,” Mojay said in an email. “The VA does not pay for or support sex reassignment surgeries.”

The VA has supported counseling, cross-sex hormone therapy, evaluations for sex reassignment surgeries performed outside the department and post-reassignment surgical care since 2011, Mojay said.

So now, the Army is planning on pushing that Manning fellow to the head of the line at the VHA to get his treatment.

From CBS Los Angeles we learn of 28 veterans still waiting in line for their turn at VA benefits. Veterans wait for years for their claims to the benefits they’ve earned, they wait for treatment at VA hospitals, now we find veterans waiting to be buried;

The law states veterans are supposed to receive a proper burial.

The Veterans Administration says they were never notified the bodies were processed and ready to be buried.

More than two dozen bodies were transported to the Riverside National Cemetery Friday afternoon and more could be moved as they are identified.

On Friday evening, KCAL9?s Stacey Butler reported the LA County Morgue and the Veteran’s Administration were blaming each other for the mistake.

At this point, the Veterans’ Affairs Department has no credibility in the discussion about veterans waiting for what they earn and deserve. I’m pretty sure that a morgue would want to clear out space in their facility, and it’s more believable that some lazy bureaucrat would ignore notifications from the city.

I may be wrong, it happened once before when I thought I thought I was wrong about something, but I was right.

Chief Tango sends us a link to the Washington Post in which they report that Shinseki has no plans to leave his post at the Veterans’ Affairs Department;

“I came here to do one thing: Which is to take care of veterans and families. We’ve run hard for five years, I think we have good things to show for it, there’s more to be done,” he said.

VA officials began a nationwide audit of facilities this week and Shinseki said the review is “about halfway through.” He expects to be able to present Obama with some initial findings by next week.

Asked if he had offered his resignation to Obama, Shinseki said: “No. You guys know me better than that.”

Yeah, well, the only people he has taken care of is VA employees, VA employees that the Democrats in the Senate want to protect, too. Yesterday, the House sent a bill to the Senate that would make it easier for Shinseki to clean house at the VA, but, according to the Washington Free Beacon, Democrats blocked Marco Rubio’s request that they vote on the Veterans Affairs Management Accountability Act (which passed the House in a bipartisan vote of 390 to 33) immediately, but the Senate Democrats would rather dither;

Senator Bernie Sanders, a union-backed socialist from Vermont, objected on behalf of Senate Democrats to Rubio’s request. Instead of taking any action now, Sanders said he is going to hold a hearing—several weeks from now.

Sanders, who chairs the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, has been one of the most outspoken defenders of the VA against allegations of misconduct. When asked about reports of multiple deaths related to long wait times at the VA healthcare system, Sanders told CNN: “People die every day.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) on Thursday offered a lukewarm assessment of the House-passed legislation, describing it as “not unreasonable.”

Yeah, it is no surprise that Shinseki thinks that he can keep his job since the politicians have his back. I guess enough veterans haven’t died yet, so Shinseki still has work to do. Maybe if they can stretch this out long enough, Americans will move on to the next shiny object and they can put this one in the ‘win’ column, too, while no one is paying attention. Incompetent boobery wins again.

The president held a press conference today to announce that Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs, Eric Shinseki has resigned his position will remain in that position. Actually, I wrote that paragraph 15 minutes before the press conference began. I have held a grudge against Shinseki since 2001 when the Army Times reprinted an open letter I wrote to him in regards to the Black Beret issue and someone told me that he said “Who knew a retired platoon sergeant knows how to use email?”

Now, our next worry is who will be nominated to be the next secretary. Shinseki should have been the best secretary in the history of the department, you know, being a wounded veteran himself. But, the Peter Principle remains in effect and Ric Shinseki’s picture will always accompany the definition.

I predicted that Shinseki would stay if he survived the criticism of Jon Stewart the other night – I guess I was right. But even Tammy Duckworth, a wounded veteran now in Congress and a former employee of Ric Shinseki criticized him to the Washington Post yesterday.

The president says that he “will not stand for it…will not tolerate it”. But somehow he’ll allow Shinseki to conduct the investigation into his own incompetent boobery. “Upholding our sacred trust to veterans” should not include allowing Shinseki to continue in that position. He can’t help that he’s a boob and he’s not going to be miraculously cured of being a boob with one meeting with the president.

The president says that he’s going to continue to fix whatever is wrong in the VA, but he promised to do that years ago, and it’s not going to be fixed as long as an incompetent boob remains at the head of the department.