Category: Veterans’ Affairs Department

The Military Times says that VA Undersecretary for Health David Shulkin claims that healthcare has improved at their Phoenix facilities in spite of what the VAOIG report says.

However, he said the report also showed how the Phoenix facilities have improved in the last two years such has more hiring, 70,000 square feet of additional space and “fast track” care for the emergency room.

“We’ve seen our consults and our wait times come down significantly. And most important, we’ve seen our patient satisfaction — what veterans are saying about their care and their access to care in Phoenix — rise significantly from 66 percent into the mid-70s,” Shulkin said.

Yeah, well, tell that to the 215 people who died waiting for appointments. This is from the report;

The OIG’s Office of Healthcare Inspections (OHI) reviewed a total of 294 facility consults for 215 individual patients who had open consult requests at the time of their deaths, or had consults discontinued after the date of their deaths. This included 87 deceased patients with 116 open consults from a report that identified patients who had open consults and a date of death associated with their medical record. The review also included 119 deceased patients with 169 open consults who had an active or pending consult on September 30, 2015, but died before that date, and/or had at least one consult that was ordered from May 1 through September 30, 2015, and was discontinued after the date of death. In addition, OHI reviewed nine deceased patients’ records with nine discontinued consults from a list of discontinued vascular consults provided by the complainant.

Of the 215 individual patients’ records reviewed, OHI determined that untimely care from PVAHCS may have contributed to the death of 1 patient. OHI found that this patient never received an appointment for a cardiology exam that could have prompted further definitive testing and interventions that could have forestalled his death. OHI determined that the remaining patients’ records reviewed did not die because they did

Emphasis is mine.

Shulkin says that the cancellations were made by low level employees who didn’t understand the process, so it’s all better now – the six-figure bosses aren’t canceling appointments. I feel better and those patients are all a little less dead.

Bobo sends us a link to Fox News which reports that, in addition to veterans waiting in line to get into the Veterans’ Affairs system, there’s also a wait line to get buried for veterans who have passed while they were in the Edward Hines Jr. VA Hospital in Illinois;

“Hines VA — the hospital that has been overrun with cockroaches and mold and left vets waiting for care for months on secret wait lists, has reached a new low in the treatment of our veterans,” [Senator Mark Kirk, R-Ill.] told FoxNews.com. “We now have reports of bodies being left to decompose in the morgue for months on end.”

The whistleblower, who has spoken with Kirk’s office, described a “horrible issue” at the hospital in the letter to the IG: “Some veteran’s remains have been left in our hospital morgue for 45 days or more until they are stacked to capacity at times.”

On at least one occasion, a body had liquefied and the bag burst when staff had attempted to move it, said Alissa McCurley, Kirk’s deputy chief of staff.

Kirk discussed firing Christopher Wirtjes, chief of Patient Administrative Services with Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs Bob McDonald and you already know the outcome of that discussion. McDonald was “non-committal” according to Kirk. They’re not taking care of living veterans, so why should they care about the dead ones?

Earlier this year, we talked about Air Force Colonel Eugene Marcus Caughey who was removed from his office as the vice commander of the 50th Space Wing at Schriever Air Force Base because of charges he faced of rape, assault and adultery. His court martial was scheduled to begin on October 17th, until this news this weekend;

Sgt. Tim Stankey, the spokesman for the Colorado Springs Police Department, said officers were dispatched after receiving a report of an apparent suicide. Stankey said investigators are waiting for information from the coroner to help determine the cause of Caughey’s death, but that there is no indication his death was a homicide.

Speaking of suicide, Bobo sends us a link from the New York Daily News which claims that one third of calls to the Veterans’ Affairs Suicide hotline go unanswered because of lazy staff;

Some hotline workers handle fewer than five calls per day and leave before their shifts end, even as crisis calls have increased sharply in recent years, said Greg Hughes, the former director of the VA’s Veterans Crisis Line. Hughes said in an internal email that some crisis line staffers “spend very little time on the phone or engaged in assigned productive activity.” Coverage at the crisis line suffers “because we have staff who routinely request to leave early,” he said.

An average of 35 to 40 percent of crisis calls received in May rolled over to back-up centers where workers have less training to deal with veterans’ problems, Hughes said.

Now, I’m not saying that Colonel Caughey called the VA hotline, but the odds are, if he did, he probably wouldn’t have got the help he needed anyway.

Forbes talks about the Veterans’ Affairs Department and their massive expenditures for art work to decorate their facilities during a time that veterans are dying while waiting in line for healthcare;

For example, a VA facility dedicated to serving blind – yes blind – veterans spent $670,000 for two commissioned sculptures. Just last month, a VA spokesperson stood in front of the infamous $1.2 million “cubed-rock” sculpture in Palo Alto, CA and argued that this type of artwork “creates a healing environment.” Yes, nothing creates a healing environment quite like long waiting lines that are in part the result of resources being misallocated.

So, the VA has modified their policy for buying expensive decorations – they merely require more signatures to authorize those purchases.

So, why didn’t the VA institute a permanent moratorium on pricey art?

Well, it could be personal to the top administrators. Oil portraits, busts, and self-named buildings have a certain appeal to bureaucrats. In 2010, the VA spent $60,000 for two commissioned oil portraits of the previous Secretaries of Veterans Affairs: James Peake ($24,882) and Jim Nicholson ($24,675). Additionally, thousands of dollars were spent on a sculpture bust of Congressman Jerry L. Pettis in 2012 on a medical center that already bears his name within the Loma Linda VA system, California.

All of these expenditures occurred during now-infamous VA scandal, when tragically, many calls to the suicide assistance hotline were answered by voicemail.

The culture at the VA is what needs to change. They throw huge parties for themselves, they game their own system to their own benefit, no one is held accountable for anything. While there are people who want to help veterans in the department, the overall culture is not one that helps veterans. It costs lives.

63-year-old Eric D. Smith was sentenced to four years and three months in prison with no possibility of parole this week. He also must pay back the $234,461 that he defrauded from the Veterans Affairs Department while he claimed to be a veteran from October 2012 until he was caught in April 2014, according to the Justice Department website.

On Feb. 3, 2016, Smith pleaded guilty to one count of violating the False Claims Act and one count of student loan fraud. Smith admitted that he assumed the identity of another person, a veteran of the U.S. Navy, from October 2012 through April 2014. Smith fraudulently obtained a VA identification card and VA health care benefits utilizing this stolen identity.

Smith fraudulently received approximately $15,459 in VA health care treatment, $12,956 in Veterans Retraining Assistance Program educational benefits and $656 in travel benefits from the Kansas City VA Medical Center.

Military Times says that wasn’t the first time nor was Missouri the only place;

That restitution includes payments to additional agencies victimized by Smith when he engaged in similar fraud in Maryland, Georgia and Florida.

These are the guys ahead of you in line at the VA.

Andy11M sends us a link to the report on Dennis Paulsen who was convicted of disability fraud earlier this year. His scam netted him about $1.6 million over more than 25 years from the VA and Social Security, according to prosecutors involved with his case. After two years in the Navy, they diagnosed him with multiple sclerosis (MS) and he got an early discharge as well as the cash perks that go along with being 100% disabled.

Prosecutors said that the only time he’d appear to be disabled was when he was on his way to a VA appointment. The rest of his time he spent playing sports, even bungee jumping. he researched the symptoms on line so he’d know what to tell the doctors;

Paulsen even competed in a Marine Corps “Tough Mudder” race, but he argues that it wasn’t easy for him.

“I struggled through that. I struggled, and I let people know that,” Paulsen said. “Every job I try I looked healthy enough to do. But I’d go out to work at Lawn Doctor and try to open up the fertilizer bags and things would slip out of the bags. But here I am, I look healthy. We wouldn’t even be discussing this if I went to Afghanistan or Iraq and got my legs blown off and had to wear prosthetics and then you see prosthetics, people with prosthetics competing [at the Invictus Games].”

He continued, “They get looked at as inspiring. But I get looked at like I’m a fraud because you can’t see the disease?”

When asked why the military owes him a lifetime of benefits when he’s fit enough to do all the activities he was photographed doing, Paulsen said it’s “because I’m service-connected.”

He said he feels he didn’t have a fair trial because he didn’t have a jury of his peers.

“Nobody on that jury has MS,” Paulsen said.

Paulsen was sentenced to 41 months in jail and to pay back his $1.6 million tab along with a fine. He still claims that he’s disabled, despite the evidence against him.

Bobo sends us a link to the New York Times that reports on the sad end of Peter A. Kaisen, of Islip a 76-year-old veteran in the parking lot of the Northport Veterans Affairs Medical Center on Long Island, New York;

[T]wo people connected to the hospital who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss his death said that he had been frustrated that he was unable to see an emergency-room physician for reasons related to his mental health. “He went to the E.R. and was denied service,” one of the people, who currently works at the hospital, said. “And then he went to his car and shot himself.”

The worker questioned why Mr. Kaisen had not been referred to the hospital’s Building 64, its mental health center. The staff member said that while there was normally no psychologist at the ready in the E.R., one was always on call, and that the mental health building was open “24/7.”

“Someone dropped the ball,” the worker said. “They should not have turned him away.”

Hindsight is 20/20. Personally, I wouldn’t give the VA the break they get when veterans kills themselves. Like I’ve said, generally, I get treated well by the medical staff at the VA, however, the gatekeepers, the bureaucrats, are a huge pain in the ass, especially when you’re in need.