This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Veterans’ Affairs Department

  • Phoenix VA; secret list for doctors kills 40

    Phoenix VA; secret list for doctors kills 40

    Veterans-Affairs2

    Several folks have sent us a link to the CNN report about the Phoenix VA’s “secret list” for veterans’ appointments to see doctors.

    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.

    For six months, CNN has been reporting on extended delays in health care appointments suffered by veterans across the country and who died while waiting for appointments and care. But the new revelations about the Phoenix VA are perhaps the most disturbing and striking to come to light thus far.

    The result is that at least 40 veterans have died during their “wait time” before they could see their doctors.

    Apparently, the secret list was a manipulation of the data related to wait times. Your name would remain on the “secret list” if they weren’t able to schedule an appointment for you in less than 14 days (the statutory wait time). If they weren’t able to schedule an appointment for you before that, you just languished on the list. The result was that the hospital appeared to have a exemplary record of meeting the wait time limits. Bureaucratic success! Because that’s all that matters among bureaucrats.

    According to [Dr. Sam Foote, a retired VA doctor], the elaborate scheme in Phoenix involved shredding evidence to hide the long list of veterans waiting for appointments and care. Officials at the VA, Foote says, instructed their staff to not actually make doctor’s appointments for veterans within the computer system.

    I’m sure their performance won the folks at the Phoenix VA some hefty bonuses, too.

  • Alexander Lenox gets prison time for using vets’ stolen records

    Veterans-Affairs2

    MCPO Ret. in TN sends us a link to the story about Alexander Lenox, a convicted felon, who gets to add on another 7 1/2 years to his prison career résumé for stealing medical records from the local James A. Haley Veterans Hospital, apparently the hospital’s prosthetics unit and using them to commit tax fraud. He was busted when the cops smelled pot outside his Motel 6 room.

    Assistant U.S. Attorney Sara Sweeney told U.S. District Judge James D. Whittemore that authorities hope to bring charges soon against the person who was working at Haley and selling veterans medical records.

    The judge was horrified at the fraud, which was part of a wave of identity theft tax refund fraud that washed over the Tampa area the last few years. Tampa at one point was the recognized epicenter for this kind of theft, which involved the use of stolen identity information to file fraudulent tax returns to con the government into giving out bogus refunds.

    Nice to know your medical records are this valuable, isn’t it? And I’m thinking that everyone has their price…even some VA employees

  • GAO report; VA should improve their information security

    Veterans-Affairs2

    Yeah, I know, you’re grasping for your chair right now so you don’t fall out of it from the shock. The Government Accountability Office conducted a study which led them to conclude that the Department of Veterans’ Affairs should really do more to protect veterans’ personal information. I could have saved them some money;

    The GAO report was released in conjunction with testimony provided by Gregory Wilshusen, GAO director of information security issues, during a March 25 hearing of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs’ Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. The panel is considering draft legislation aimed at improving the VA’s information security.

    “Information security remains a long-standing challenge for the department,” Wilshusen said in his written testimony. “Specifically, VA has consistently had weaknesses in major information security control areas. For fiscal years 2007 through 2013, deficiencies were reported in each of the five major categories of information security controls as defined in our Federal Information System Controls Audit Manual.”

    VA information security control areas that have ongoing weaknesses include access control, configuration management, segregation of duties, contingency planning and security management, according to the GAO report.

    So, Congress is drafting a bill. Because the VA can’t tighten their security on their own, apparently, they need Congress to tell them to do something that they should have been doing all along. Things like not allowing employees to leave their laptops unattended in their privately-owned vehicles where the computers can be stolen, along with the PII of millions of veterans. In downtown DC. Who could have seen that coming? Obviously, not the VA, at least not without a Congressional mandate.

    So, what, exactly, does the Veterans’ Affairs Department do right? How long before the country comes to the realization that it’s a leadership issue? The VA serves the VA, not veterans.

  • Feds to fund Vets’ pot study

    Talking Points Memo reports that the Feds will fund a study to investigate the usefulness of marijuana for treating PTS;

    The Department of Health and Human Services’ decision surprised marijuana advocates who have struggled for decades to secure federal approval for research into the drug’s medical uses.

    The proposal from the University of Arizona was long ago cleared by the Food and Drug Administration, but researchers had been unable to purchase marijuana from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The agency’s Mississippi research farm is the only federally-sanctioned source of the drug.

    In a letter last week, HHS cleared the purchase of medical marijuana by the studies’ chief financial backer, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which supports medical research and legalization of marijuana and other drugs.

    I expect that phonies will overwhelm the program. Take, for example, Wayward Bill Chengelis who pretended to have PTS from an imaginary tour of Vietnam and used his phony tales and his own pretend research on pot-use easing the pretend-symptoms of his pretend-condition. We have Matthis Chiroux who is a known drug user and he pretends that he has PTS from hearing other people talk about their deployments. We have Jeremy Bergren who caught pretend PTS because his unit deployed without him. We have Zachary Findlay-Maddox who caught the PTS because he could see the smoke from the Pentagon on 9-11 from about seven miles away and his pizzaman looked like bin Laden. We have Joseph Cryer who is on 100% disability with VA from a pretend invasion of Libya he made and, of course, he has PTS. Well, that should be plenty of examples, and that’s just from our own files.

    So, if you really have PTS, by all means seek treatment and maybe this works, but expect a long line ahead of you.

  • VA budget increases

    Stars & Stripes reports that the Obama Administration is proposing a $10 billion increase to the Department of Veterans Affairs;

    The budget features $59.1 billion for medical care, approximately $1.6 billion to prevent or reduce veterans’ homelessness and $312 million for burgeoning technologies that officials hope will address the claims backlog and help them meet 2015 elimination goals, according to a VA statement.

    The budget also features $1 billion for veterans’ job programs.

    “This budget will allow us to continue the progress we have made in helping Veterans secure their place in the middle class,” Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki said in the statement. “It is a tangible demonstration of the President’s commitment to ensuring Veterans and their families have the care and benefits they’ve earned and deserve.”

    Somehow, I don’t believe the rhetoric. While I appreciate the words, it’s the actions that really mean something. The President wants to push retirees out of the Tricare system and into the VA healthcare system, to get the Defense Department out of the healthcare business. About $300 million of that $10 billion is going to claims processing and improving the intake system for the future.

  • VA’s wait time for claims processing increases

    McClatchy reports that veterans’ wait times for claims processing had increased to 900 days last year.

    After hovering between 500 and 750 days for the past decade, what the VA refers to as its “appeals resolution time” hit 923 days in fiscal 2013. That was a 37 percent jump in one year, from 675 in fiscal 2012, according to a review of the department’s annual performance report.

    The department’s long-term goal is to get that figure to 400 days, although the trend over the past decade has been in the other direction.

    Asked about the slowdown during a conference call to discuss the VA’s appeals system, the department said it has been reviewing the measure to see if it’s the most meaningful one to convey to veterans how long the appeals process might take. The department also said it was continuing to look for ways to make the process more efficient.

    It’s good that it has become a priority for this administration, imagine how bad it would be if it wasn’t a priority. If they’re looking for ways to make it more efficient, I’d say they need a leadership change and they need to put veterans in charge of the thing, veterans beside Shinseki, of course.

  • VA’s solution to backlog; destroy claims records

    I saw Concerned Veterans for America CEO Pete Hegseth on Fox this morning talking about a recording of a meeting at Veterans’ Affairs in which they discussed a solution to their serious backlog of veterans’ claims. That solution was to toss records, because they were beginning to look bad, according to a whistleblower, Oliver Mitchell, also a former Marine, as reported at The Daily Caller;

    VA Greater Los Angeles Radiology department chief Dr. Suzie El-Saden initiated an “ongoing discussion in the department” to cancel exam requests and destroy veterans’ medical files so that no record of the exam requests would exist, thus reducing the backlog, Mitchell said.

    Audio from a November 2008 meeting obtained by TheDC depicts VA Greater Los Angeles officials plotting to cancel backlogged exam requests.

    “I’m still canceling orders from 2001,” said a male official in the meeting.

    “Anything over a year old should be canceled,” replied a female official.

    “Canceled or scheduled?” asked the male official.

    “Canceled. … Your backlog should start at April ’07,” the female official replied, later adding, ”a lot of those patients either had their studies somewhere else, had their surgery … died, don’t live in the state. … It’s ridiculous.”

    Here’s the recording;

    When Mitchell blew the whistle on the operation, he was transferred to another department. The VA OIG simply made the department aware of Mitchell’s complaint instead of taking appropriate action. When Mitchell went to Congress with his complaint, he was fired from the DVA. Mitchell claims that the practice was not only a local problem, but rather a nationwide solution to the DVA’s backlog problem.

    Here’s Pete Hegseth on the issue at about 3:50 into the video;

  • VA and your PII not secure

    The Washington Times reports that an audit of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs data systems reveals that the department has a “material weakness” in the way that it handles your personally identifiable information (PII);

    The review found a list of problems including a lack of updates for security software, no monitoring of what programs were being installed on agency computers and little tracking of which personnel were accessing which systems.

    Investigators also found that background checks weren’t timely, and that “personnel were not receiving the proper level of investigation for their position sensitivity level.”

    As a result, “there is an increased risk that financial and personally identifiable information may be inadvertently or deliberately misused and may result in improper disclosure or theft,” the auditor said.

    So, there’s really no problem, if you disregard the fact that the systems storing your PII aren’t secure and the people who are handling it might not be properly cleared to handle your information. So nothing to worry about. That’s sarcasm, if you didn’t recognize it.