28 Jan 2016, 1:16 pm
danivon wrote:heaven forbid you looking, they guy who was outraged that someone linked to a report about a poll and not the actual poll...
You're making the assertion and then want me to prove you right . . . old Danivon mind-trick. No thanks.
Something tells me such a reform would not be possible without some investment.My bigger point: money alone will not solve this. The VA needs to get dissected, if not destroyed, and reassembled. It's a mess.
I'm not against this. Show me the plan.
Where figures have been falsified that is bad enough to fire the culprits, but that is not actually a cause of deaths. I think a full independent review would be appropriate to find out what has happened, why, and the actual impact.People should be fired. Their actions led to deaths of many Vets.
It was the indirect cause of many deaths. They falsified records to "shorten" actual wait times. In the meantime, Vets died. They "actually" died.
This demonstrates the incompetence:
(CNN)Hundreds of thousands of veterans listed in the Department of Veterans Affairs enrollment system died before their applications for care were processed, according to a report issued Wednesday.
The VA's inspector general found that out of about 800,000 records stalled in the agency's system for managing health care enrollment, there were more than 307,000 records that belonged to veterans who had died months or years in the past. The inspector general said due to limitations in the system's data, the number of records did not necessarily represent veterans actively seeking enrollment in VA health care.
In a response to a request by the House Committee on Veterans Affairs' to investigate a whistleblower's allegations of mismanagement at the VA's Health Eligibility Center, the inspector general also found VA staffers incorrectly marked unprocessed applications and may have deleted 10,000 or more records in the last five years.
In one case, a veteran who applied for VA care in 1998 was placed in "pending" status for 14 years. Another veteran who passed away in 1988 was found to have an unprocessed record lingering in 2014, the investigation found.
Criminality:
A manager at a Veterans Affairs medical center in Georgia is on leave with pay following his indictment on 50 counts of ordering his staff to falsify medical records of veterans waiting for outside medical care.
The case against Cathedral Henderson appears to be the first round of criminal charges stemming from a wait-times scandal that came to light last year and led to the resignation of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki.
Henderson, 50, was in charge of revenue and billing and chief of “purchase care” in Augusta, coordinating medical care for veterans that VA could not offer. He was responsible for ensuring that more than 2,700 veterans awaiting approval for care outside the system were properly referred to for doctor’s appointments.
But under pressure from VA headquarters in 2014 to close out all requests for outside care, Cathedral simply ordered his staff to falsify the waiting patients’ medical records to show that the veterans had either completed or refused services, prosecutors allege.
More criminality:
"Deceased" notes on files were removed to make statistics look better, so veterans would not be counted as having died while waiting for care, Pauline DeWenter said.
DeWenter should know. DeWenter is the actual scheduling clerk at the Phoenix VA who said for the better part of a year she was ordered by supervisors to manage and handle the so-called "secret waiting list," where veterans' names of those seeking medical care were often placed, sometimes left for months with no care at all.
For these reasons, DeWenter is among the most important and central people to the Phoenix VA scandal over a secret wait list, veterans' wait times and deaths. Despite being in the center of the storm, DeWenter has never spoken publicly about any of it -- the secret list, the altering of records, the dozens of veterans she believes have died waiting for care -- until now.
It was one of DeWenter's roles to call veterans when appointments became available to schedule them to get a consultation. Sometimes when she made those calls, she'd find that the veteran had died, so she would enter that on their records.
But at least seven times since last October, records that showed that veterans died while waiting for care -- records which DeWenter personally handled and had entered in details of veterans' deaths -- were physically altered, or written over, by someone else, DeWenter said in an exclusive interview with CNN. The changes, or re-writes, listed the veterans as living, not deceased, essentially hiding their deaths.
The alterations had even occurred in recent weeks, she said, in a deliberate attempt to try to hide just how many veterans died while waiting for care, by trying to pretend dead veterans remain alive.
"Because by doing that, that placed (the veterans) back on the wait list," said DeWenter, explaining she believes that the purpose of "bringing them back to life" in the paperwork and putting the veterans back on the electronic waiting list was to hide the fact that veterans died waiting for care.
"I would say (it was done to) hide the fact. Because it is marked a death. And that death needs to be reported. So if you change that to, 'entered in error' or, my personal favorite, 'no longer necessary,' that makes the death go away. So the death would never be reported then."
I don't know why. You forget we don't all share your magic mind-reading abilities...If Obama cares so much, why not talk about it often? Why not go on every show that will have him and lay out a plan to overhaul the VA?
I know why. You know why.
Because it's not a priority for him.
