Post by Admin on Jun 1, 2015 15:34:48 GMT
The V.A.'s ANNUAL budget is $58 BILLION dollars.
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Beginning in 2005: Denver, CO New VA Hospital building project:
A project dubbed the "biggest construction failure" in the history of the Department of Veterans Affairs -- already $1 billion over budget and more than a year behind schedule -- is getting another $100 million taxpayer bailout. The fix is only a stop-gap measure: The $100 million funds just three more weeks of work. Construction will continue on the new veterans medical center near Denver, expected to serve 400,000 former military service members and their families. The costs to taxpayers for the project have already ballooned from an initial $328 million price tag in 2005 to $1.73 billion, with years more construction to go, according to government watchdog groups.
abcnews.go.com/Politics/veterans-hospital-dubbed-biggest-construction-failure-100-million/story?id=31256468
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The V.A.'s ANNUAL budget is $58 BILLION dollars.
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November 2008: Veterans Affairs officials warned the Obama-Biden transition team in the weeks after the 2008 presidential election that the department shouldn’t trust the wait times that its facilities were reporting.
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According to a 2010 VA memo, the problem of "gaming strategies" inside the VA to meet performance goals dates to at least 2008. VA Deputy Undersecretary for Health Administrative Operations William Schoenhard wrote, "It has come to my attention that in order to improve scores on assorted access measures, certain facilities have adopted use of inappropriate scheduling practices..." Schoenhard listed 24 tactics identified in a 2008 study as inappropriately reducing the official measures of patient wait times.
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June 19, 2013 A coordinator at the Cheyenne office sent an email with instructions on how to manipulate the appointment dates. The coordinator wrote, "Yes, it is gaming the system a bit, but you have to know the rules of the game you are playing.”
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September 2013 The House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs held a hearing on preventable patient deaths in VA facilities during which representatives accused the VA of failing to discipline the officials responsible for patient deaths and instead providing performance bonuses.
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As of April 2014, the VA had paid approximately "$200 million for nearly 1,000 veterans’ wrongful deaths".
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April 30, 2014 CNN reported that at least 40 United States Armed Forces veterans died while waiting for care at the Phoenix, Arizona, Veterans Health Administration facilities. By June 5, 2014, Veterans Affairs internal investigations had identified 35 veterans who had died while waiting for care in the Phoenix VHA system. An investigation of delays in treatment throughout the Veterans Health Administration system is being conducted by the Veterans Affairs Office of the Inspector General, and the House has passed legislation to fund a $1 million criminal investigation by the Justice Department. On May 16, 2014, the Veterans Health Administration's top health official, Dr. Robert Petzel, retired early at the request of Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki. On May 30, 2014, Secretary Shinseki resigned from office amid the fallout from the controversy. As of early June 2014, several other VA medical centers around the nation have been identified with the same problems as the Phoenix facility, and the investigations by the VA Inspector General, the Congress and others are widening.
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Democratic President Barack Obama's chief of staff, Denis McDonough, said on May 18, 2014 that Obama was "madder than hell" about the reports of delays in treatment. McDonough said that "At the same time that we're looking at accountability we want to continue to perform to provide our veterans the services that they have earned."
[(....Obama was informed of the problematic delays back in 2008.)]
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In May 2014 The VA OIG reported that 17 veteran deaths had occurred while waiting for VHA treatment in the Phoenix VA system, and on June 5, 2014 the Acting Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Sloan Gibson, reported that the VA had identified 18 additional deaths. The 18 deaths were among the group of 1700 identified as "at risk of being lost or forgotten". Griffin said that autopsy reports would need to be investigated to determine if the deaths were caused by the delays in treatment.
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June 9, 2014 An internal VA audit released found that more than 120,000 veterans were left waiting or never got care and that schedulers were pressured to use unofficial lists or engage in inappropriate practices to make waiting times appear more favorable.
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On June 11, 2014, the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened a criminal investigation of the VA.
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An internal Veterans Affairs audit released June 9, 2014 found that:
More than 120,000 veterans were left waiting or never got care.
Pressures were placed on schedulers to use unofficial lists or engage in inappropriate practices to make waiting times appear more favorable.
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An updated audit released June 19, 2014 found:
Tens of thousands more veterans that previously reported wait more than a month for an appointment.
Disparities between reported wait times and actual wait times
Senator Tom Coburn, (R) Oklahoma, released a year-long investigative report that suggests the number of veterans who died while awaiting delayed care or treatment over the past decade may number as high as one thousand.
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On June 20, 2014, the U.S. House Veterans Affairs Committee learned that every one of the 470 senior executives in the VA received performance evaluations that indicated they were at least "fully successful" in each of the past four years. Senior executives were paid a total of $2.4 million in bonus compensation in the most recent year.
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On June 27, 2014, President Obama's Deputy Chief of Staff, Rob Nabors, reported to Obama on June 27, 2014 that he found "significant and chronic system failures", a "corrosive culture", damaged morale, and a need for additional staff. Representative Jeff Miller, said, "It appears the White House has finally come to terms with the serious and systemic VA health care problems we've been investigating and documenting for years" and that he would work with the White House to fix the problems. The independent chair of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, Bernie Sanders, said, "No organization the size of VA can operate effectively without a high level of transparency and accountability. Clearly that is not the case now at the VA."
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In August 2014, Obama signed Congressional legislation regarding funding and reform of the Veterans Health Administration.
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Acting VA Secretary Sloan Gibson said that he accepted the OSC's recommendations and had directed a review of the Office of Medical Inspector that was to be completed in two weeks. Gibson said "I am deeply disappointed not only in the substantiation of allegations raised by whistleblowers, but also in the failures within VA to take whistleblower complaints seriously."
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Politicians from both Republican and Democratic parties have commented on the scandal. Democratic Representative Steve Israel said that "It's a shame that when Republicans had a chance to help vets get their benefits from the V.A., they blocked a solution", referring to Republican opposition to the 2013 Veterans Backlog Reduction Act. Democrats, led by Senator Patty Murray, have aggressively sought more money for veterans' services since the second term of President George W. Bush. Many Republicans have countered that the problems in the VA are ones of management rather than funding and that Obama Administration officials are responsible for not discovering the patient backlog. Republican Representative Jackie Walorski said that the VA had "bureaucracy run amok" and noted a case in Atlanta where "two top officials were able to retire early and three were reprimanded" over three preventable deaths. At the end of May 2014, bipartisan agreement emerged among Democratic Senator Barbara A. Mikulski and Republican Senator Richard C. Shelby on the Senate Appropriations Committee to include funding for civil and criminal investigations into Veterans Affairs in a veterans spending bill.
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The taxpayers pay the VA's annual budget: $58 BILLION dollars.
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October 2014 Rep. Jeff Miller. Republican of Florida, chairs the House Veterans Affairs Committee. He said that the new VA law gives agency officials five days to respond to notices of intent to fire them.
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October 2014 The director of the Georgia VA retired four days in advance of VA's announcement that he would be fired, and the procurement official also retired in advance of her firing. The procurement official was nearly hired by the U.S. Department of Energy before that department learned of the findings against her at the VA.
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October 2014 Miller said that "If any current laws or regulations are impeding the (VA)’s ability to swiftly hold employees accountable, VA leaders must work with Congress so those laws and regulations can be changed", and “VA appears to be giving failing executives an opportunity to quit, retire or find new jobs without consequence." He said he opposed allowing officials who had committed misconduct being allowed to “slip out the back door with a pension."
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November 2014
The official in charge of the Phoenix VA facility, who had been on administrative leave for almost seven months, was fired. While on administrative leave, she was paid over $90,000. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz, said that the payments were "a completely unacceptable use of taxpayer dollars that should instead go to providing care for veterans." Dr. Sam Foote said that the firing was "a good first step" and that "I think there are a lot of others who need to follow her out the door."
[(.....Reminder: We pay the VA $58 BILLION dollars annually to care for our heroes.....)]
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November 2014
The VA temporarily appointed a new manager for the southwest region of the United States. The southwest region includes the Phoenix VA facility. The new manager was previously involved in clandestinely placing a camera inside the hospital room of a patient in Florida. She later said that the manner of the camera's placement was "wrong". The Republic reported that "(she) at first said she authorized the videotaping because nurses were upset and wanted to prove family members were committing medical sabotage. Moments later, she said there was no intention to keep the filming secret from the Carnegies, and the camera was really approved for patient safety." She said that she has previously been assigned to problematic hospitals during her career, including those with ethics violations or financial problems, and has been successful at fixing the problems.
[(....Scientology also likes to plant cameras in personal spaces without clearance or permission.....)]
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February 2015
Secretary McDonald made two controversial statements in February:
On a February 15, 2015 airing of Meet the Press, McDonald claimed that 60 U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs employees had been fired due to the VA's wait time scandal. Later, he backtracked and clarified it was only 8 employees that lost their jobs.
On February 23, 2015, McDonald admitted he misspoke to a homeless veteran on January 30, 2015 about his serving in the U.S. Army special forces, a conversation that was recorded by a CBS television news crew accompanying him during a nationwide count of homeless veterans. "I have no excuse, I was not in the special forces" he told The Huffington Post, which first broke the story. The Huffington Post reported that "special operations forces" includes the Army Rangers and that McDonald:
"...completed Army Ranger training and took courses in jungle, arctic and desert warfare."
"...While he earned a Ranger Tab designating him as a graduate of Ranger School, he never served in a Ranger battalion or any other special operations unit."
[(.....that would be a difficult thing to "misremember")]
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April 2015:
The New York Times reported that in contrast to previous statements about the number of firings related to the scandal "new internal documents show that the real number of people removed from their jobs is much smaller still: at most, three". The Department of Veterans Affairs did not dispute this number, but said that disciplinary action is being taken against over 100 other employees. Congressional Republicans were outraged. Representative Jeff Miller said. "“Rather than disciplining bad employees, V.A. often just transfers them to other V.A. facilities or puts them on paid leave for months on end," and "“Everyone knows accountability is a major problem at the department." Miller said that he would introduce new legislation to hasten the firing process. Raymond Kelley, legislative director for Veterans of Foreign Wars, said that “The government firing system is so cumbersome bad employees can continue to be paid for years,” and “We need to show them you can no longer hide just because you have a government job, unclog the middle management that appears to be part of the problem and get the right people in those positions.”
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Analysis by management and medical experts:
Management experts criticized the 14-day wait goal, saying that the VA poorly designed its performance management system. Experts said that the high-stakes goal without checks and balances encouraged "gaming the numbers". Also, the lack of data at the Federal level about times and costs for basic services meant that VA executives had no way to take scheduling data from the Phoenix facility and compare it to data from other facilities. Such a comparison could have helped VA executives to realize that the data being produced by the Phoenix facility was anomalous.
Dr. Robert Roswell, a previous VA Undersecretary of Health and now Professor of Medicine at the University of Oklahoma, said that an appropriate measure of VHA performance was not patient wait times, which were largely outside the control of the staff, because VHA employees do not control the number of patients seeking care. A better measure of performance, would for example, measure the efficient use of VHA resources, such as the number of no-show appointments.
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veterans_Health_Administration_scandal_of_2014
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2015 VA Scandal Update:
www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/04/18/new-va-scandals-call-into-question-agency-ability-to-clean-house/
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