America’s Vets Still Underserved By Sclerotic VA…and Now the VA’s Watchdog!
It has been almost two years since the scandal over wait times for vets trying to get into see medical personnel at VA facilities first erupted and America’s Iraq and Afghan vets are still on the losing end of a sclerotic, mismanaged, and secretive VA bureaucracy. We can now add obstructionist to that list of adjectives.
The initial firestorm centered around the “bookkeeping,” if you will, related to how vets got appointments for care. It was revealed then that officials at the Phoenix VA Medical Center were keeping secret ledgers to mask the excessive wait times for veterans seeking care, including mental health care. News reports at the time indicated that as many as forty vets may have died in the deadly queue, then-VA secretary Eric Shinseki was drummed out of the VA as a result, and it quickly became clear that the Phoenix facility was only the tip of the iceberg.
Fast forward to October, 2015; CNN reported that even after Congress (always poised to respond quickly with new money after an embarrassing scandal) appropriated $15 billion in additional dollars to weed out the back log, added more personnel to handle the increased demand for VA services. and the Obama administration tapped a new VA chief to clean out the Augean Stables and bring wait times into line, VA insiders painted a different picture. So while VA Secretary Bob McDonald testified publicly before Congress in August, 2015 that everything was looking rosier:
In August, more than 8,000 requests for care had wait times longer than 90 days at the Phoenix VA, according to documents obtained by CNN, but whistle blowers say delays like these are not accurately reflected in public data because of changes in the VA’s method of measuring wait times.
“The VA central office enables an official line that’s not consistent with reality,” the source in Phoenix said.
Additional VA documents show ongoing delays in care are not limited to Phoenix.
An internal VA draft memo from August warns, “Currently wait times are increasing significantly,” referring to an overall increase of appointments with delays.
VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson, who received this internal memo, told CNN there are almost 500,000 appointments with extended wait times, which includes appointments with delays longer than 30 days and veterans waiting on a list for appointments to become available.
According to Gibson, the number of appointments with extended waits is even higher than it was more than a year ago, when government and media reports revealed veterans were dying while waiting for care in the midst of an immense backlog of appointments.
Here we are at the end of the first quarter of 2016. It appears that, despite assurances by VA spokespersons to the contrary, improvement in wait times, if they have improved at all, may be predicated upon a phenomenon that fans of The HBO series The Wire will be familiar with; a (widespread) federal practice lovingly referred to as “juking that stats.”
Add to that a new wrinkle. The VA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), comprised of officials who are charged with representing the taxpayers’ interests and those of the stakeholders’ (in this case, vets and their families) and who were tasked with conducting an independent, professional, thorough investigation of the underlying management issues and implement reforms to forestall this from every happening again now themselves appear to have succumbed to agency capture.
The OIG was directed to initiate audits/investigation of 111 facilities over how the facilities, from outpatient clinics to vast medical centers, were following the new protocols when handling requests for appointments and wait times for vets. President Obama signed a law in December, 2015 mandating that the OIG release reports publicly within three days of completion. Yet, even though a significant number of these OIG reports were supposedly finished in December, 2015, agency officials had been holding up their release…until this week, when they finally buckled under pressure from justifiably angry members of Congress and both sides of the aisle and media outlets, agitating for the results.
On February 29, 2016, the OIG began what it called a “systemic systematic roll-out of 77 administrative summaries of wait time investigations”….but what they have posted on their website are only administrative summaries. Almost every one of the 21 summaries posted as of this writing were initiated after a whistle-blower allegation was made, and yet many of the summaries conclude that there was no manipulation of wait times using secret ledgers or log books. Still, it has been reported that the OIG did indeed find evidence of wrongdoing in 51 of the 73 completed audits/investigations, ranging from simple rule violations to outright fraud. So where are these reports? And what is being done to hold VA officials accountable for this wrongdoing?
Looks like, in typical fashion…not much!
Almost two years after the fact, Sharon Helman, the director of the Phoenix VA Health Care System, terminated in 2014 over patient care issues, pleaded guilty on February 29, 2016 to filing a false financial disclosure that failed to list more than $50,000 in gifts she had received from a lobbyist. Helman accepted a car, tickets to a Beyonce concert, a check for $5,ooo, airline tickets, and family tickets to Disneyworld from a contractor with business pending before the VA:
“‘Helman was not charged with unlawfully accepting the gifts, but failing to provide the VA with required information to evaluate a potential conflict of interest…Phoenix FBI Special Agent in Charge Mark Cwynar said, ‘Although this plea agreement calls for a term of probation, making a false financial disclosure to the federal government is a felony and will permanently attach to Ms. Helman’s record.’”
She got probation….And get this, she was also allowed to keep her $9,000 federal bonus!
Furthermore, the VA’s General Counsel sent a letter to President Obama on February 25, 2016 taking serious issue with the way OIG is conducting these wait-time investigations and the way it has handled whistle-blowers:
“The OIG investigations that the VA submitted in response to both referrals are incomplete. They do not respond to the issues that the whistle-blowers raised. The OIG investigations found evidence to support the whistle-blowers’ allegations that employees were using separate spreadsheets outside of the VA’s electronic scheduling and patient records systems. However, the OIG largely limited its review to determining whether these separate spreadsheets were ‘secret.’”
The OIG summaries provide a highly disturbing snapshot of an agency with a dysfunctional culture, in turmoil, wherein employees are operating at odds with the agency’s (confusing and contradictory) guidelines, still maintaining multiple databases and (sometimes paper) lists of vets waiting for appointments, engaging in unauthorized practices related to when they enter a vet’s appointment time into the VA’s electronic database, and a lot of silly parsing by the OIG and those they are investigating over what the word “secret” actually means (Bill Clinton, call your office!).
And if you really want to blow a gasket, take a look at what the Daily Caller’s investigative reporter Luke Rosiak has uncovered about way the VA moves its patently incompetent bosses around the country in a toxic daisy chain, from one VA facility to another, sometimes for years, because they simply cannot fire them.
It appears as though the OIG has delayed the release of the reports and then front-loaded the release of the less outrageous reports. Members of Congress are apoplectic about what they view as the OIGs’s deliberate slow-walking the reports, and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) has gone so far as to hold up Senate consideration of the next OIG nominee until she gets answers to what is going on. It is also clear that the OIG intends to release the more scurrilous reports, in summary form, in dribs and drabs.
Lots of developments over the last few weeks related to the VA wait-time scandal, none of them good for taxpayers. But, most importantly, our vets deserve so much better than this.
