VA-veterans-affairsThe Next Big Thing™ in whitewashes is just in from the VA. The VA OIG has written a superficial report, after a cursory investigation, that — wonder of wonders! —  finds no wrongdoing. Nothing happened. Why, the cover letter from the VA’s latest failed Secretary hints that even the dead guys aren’t dead:

We appreciate OIG’s in-depth investigation into a whistleblower’s allegation that

40 Veterans died waiting for an appointment. OIG pursued this allegation, but the whistleblower was unable to provide OIG with a list of 40 patient names. It is important to note that while OIG’s case reviews in the report document substantial delays in care, and quality of care concerns, OIG was unable to conclusively assert that the absence of timely quality care caused the death of these Veterans.

Indeed, the report’s very title reanimates the vets slain by bonus-grubbing VA weenies’ neglect (emphasis ours): Review of Alleged Patient Deaths, Patient Wait Times, and Scheduling Practices at the Phoenix VA Health Care System. Alleged, dear friends: they’re probably not dead. They’s just pining for the fjords.

And the administration’s hod carriers in the press were keen to carry this particular hod, most of them quoting the text from the Secretary’s CYA letter, above, found in appendix K of the report. Case in point: NBC News’s Rich Gardella.

But what about those 40 vets? Did they die while neglected on waiting lists, or did the whistleblower, Dr Foote, make them up? Well, let’s quote from the IG report:

From our review of PVAHCS electronic records, we were able to identify 40 patients who died while on the EWL during the period April2013 through April 2014.

The “EWL” is the electronic wait list; most veterans at Phoenix were never placed on that “official” list, and the IG does not seem to have pursued any investigative leads about vets who died on the bogus, ad-hoc, and secret “neglect lists.” The report’s signatory, Acting IG Richard Griffin, argues that the neglect doesn’t matter because the delays in or absence of treatment was never “clinically significant”: i.e., for all those 40 and all the other dead vets, it was just their time to go; they might have gone while neglected, but that was not a cause of their deaths.

How he knows this when the clinical state of the neglected vets was, quite literally, unknown to the VA, the agency that deliberately was not seeing them, is unclear.

However, the patients on the EWL were a minority of the Phoenix VA patients. For every patient on that list, more than two were on the unofficial, shadow, hidden-for-the-bonuses wait lists:

Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General Review of Alleged Patient Deaths, Patient Wait Times, and Scheduling Practices at the Phoenix VA Health Care System, Report #14-02603-267

As of April 22, 2014, we identified about 1,400 veterans waiting to receive a scheduled primary care appointment who were appropriately included on the PVAHCS EWL. However, as our work progressed, we identified over 3,500 additional veterans, many of whom were on what we determined to be unofficial wait lists, waiting to be scheduled for appointments but not on PVAHCS’s official EWL. These veterans were at risk of never obtaining their requested or necessary appointments. PVAHCS senior administrative and clinical leadership were aware of unofficial wait lists and that access delays existed.

Heads are going to roll, right? Just about the time that Lucy lets Charlie Brown kick the football?

Unlikely. Probably the biggest lie, among the many lies in the report and in the Secretary’s response, is the following:

VA took immediate and ongoing actions to address the deficiencies

The scandal first broke on April 30, 2014, 121 days ago, when CNN broke the story that 40 vets had died due to the Phoenix wait list abuse. To date, apart from Rick Shinseki who slunk off into a too-late retirement with a fat pension and an inflated opinion of himself, no one’s lost a job, or faced a charge, or even had any superior direct a cross word at him.

One of the few actions that the new secretary has taken? Restore the bonuses.

Yeah. That’ll help.

This entry was posted in Veterans’ Issues on by Hognose.

About Hognose

Former Special Forces 11B2S, later 18B, weapons man. (Also served in intelligence and operations jobs in SF).

3 thoughts on “VA: The Next Whitewash

Bill K

“It was this spirit of national efficiency in the Circumlocution Office that had gradually led to its having something to do with everything…

Numbers of people were lost in the Circumlocution Office. Unfortunates with wrongs, or with projects for the general welfare (and they had better have had wrongs at first, than have taken that bitter English recipe for certainly getting them), who in slow lapse of time and agony had passed safely through other public departments; who, according to rule, had been bullied in this, over-reached by that, and evaded by the other; got referred at last to the Circumlocution Office, and never reappeared in the light of day. Boards sat upon them, secretaries minuted upon them, commissioners gabbled about them, clerks registered, entered, checked, and ticked them off, and they melted away. In short, all the business of the country went through the Circumlocution Office, except the business that never came out of it; and its name was Legion.
” – From Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens

Wise Cave Owl

ISIS could clean up this ZOGmess really fast. Heads would roll

Aesop

This is like watching the train wreck in the early part of The Fugitive.

In slow motion.

On an endless loop.

And I swear, the dominant selection criteria for management in the VA has to be having the memory of a fruit fly.