{"id":49104,"date":"2014-05-29T08:53:25","date_gmt":"2014-05-29T12:53:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=49104"},"modified":"2014-05-29T08:53:25","modified_gmt":"2014-05-29T12:53:25","slug":"shinseki-committed-to-restoring-integrity-at-va","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=49104","title":{"rendered":"Shinseki “committed to restoring integrity” at VA"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

He shouldn’t have to “restore integrity” if his leadership in the agency had caused the loss of integrity in the first place.<\/p>\n

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;<\/p>\n