How widespread is the VA rot?
It now appears that an award-winning VA hospital in Texas was cooking the books for years—falsifying wait times in order to keep winning those awards and bonuses.
Investigations went nowhere:
Emails and VA memos obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast provide what is among the most comprehensive accounts yet of how high-level VA hospital employees conspired to game the system. It shows not only how they manipulated hospital wait lists but why””to cover up the weeks and months veterans spent waiting for needed medical care. If those lag times had been revealed, it would have threatened the executives’ bonus pay.
What’s worse, the documents show the wrongdoing going unpunished for years, even after it was repeatedly reported to local and national VA authorities. That indicates a new troubling angle to the VA scandal: that the much touted investigations may be incapable of finding violations that are hiding in plain sight…
“This newest case just further illustrates that the scandal is much more far reaching than most people realize,” Rieckhoff said, “Phoenix was just the tip of the iceberg. Scandal has become the new normal, it’s the status quo at the VA right now.”
Apparently it’s been the status quo at the VA for years. The only difference now is that it’s being revealed.
So we have the lengthy wait times, which would be bad enough. But then there was the coverup, motivated by the fact that long wait times were penalized and short wait times incentivized. The solution: lie about the wait times. It worked for quite a while, didn’t it? In a system that rewards lying, the truth-teller loses:
There’s enormous pressure to report favorable wait times for VA patients, the Texas whistleblower explained, even if those wait times are completely false.
“If [VA] directors report low numbers, they’re the outlier. They won’t stay a director very long and they certainly won’t get promoted. No one is getting rewarded for honesty. They pretty much have to lie, if they don’t they won’t go anywhere,” the whistleblower added. Weighted more heavily than other performance measures, the wait time numbers alone “count for 50% of the executive career field bonus, which is a pretty powerful motivator.”
Though VA hospitals may be struggling with increasing patient loads and inadequate resources””including too few medical providers””they are punished for acknowledging those problems.
Something that looks good on paper and seems to make sense—rewarding short wait times—is deeply flawed if it’s really really hard to effect short wait times because the resources to do so just aren’t there. So the lying begins, and people realize there’s no other way to function in that system.
That doesn’t make the lying okay, but it does make it explicable. Those who won’t lie tend to be winnowed out in a process of natural selection, a survival of the fittest for that particular environment. Not everyone in the system was corrupted, but enough were to make it a widespread and practically standard occurrence.
The article goes on to describe a coverup of the coverup, exoneration by an investigation that was also fraudulent.
And the final paragraphs of the article are just plain sad:
The current investigatons are not enough, Rieckhoff said. Having a White House political operative looking into this is not an adequate solution. This is not something that one of the president’s lieutenants should be handling.”
“There’s definitely reason to think there may have been criminal activity,” Rieckhoff said. “Maybe it’s time for Attorney Genral Holder and the Department of Justice to get involved, or for someone else trained to investigate criminal cases to take the lead on this.”
Do not sit on a hot stove waiting for that DOJ investigation to take place. And what is Eric Holder if not one of the president’s most loyal lieutenants?
Well, they saw Shinseki pocketing a lot of goodies from his tenure, so they thought they might as well cut some orders and get some honors too.
So what were you expecting? The SEC couldn’t determine that Bernie Madoff was a crook when they were told he was a crook.
The SEC gets kickbacks from the Enrons and Made off with lots of money people.
It’s why they had to make an example out of M Stewart. Some low hanging fruit to show the public they had cajones.
The Obama Kid was taught “goof on, goof off.”
The programs to incentivize good performance are almost always open to fraud. Cook the books, back date stock options, re-price stock options, fake programs, hide data, etc. If money can be made through fraudulent activity, someone will figure out how to do it. The bigger and more bureaucratic the organization, the easier it is. One old-fashoined incentive, perform or lose your job, seems to have gone by the wayside, particularly in the government. Market forces aren’t always pretty or stable, but they do a much better job of separating the performers from the deadwood.
My last Navy active duty assignment was in an organization that received an award as the best unit of its type in the Navy. What a fraud that was. It was a good unit, but made itself exemplary primarily with the help of sharp pencils. That affair was one of the reasons I decided to resign and seek employment with the airlines.
Although many have acknowledged (myself included) that the VA has long been a problem, it seems that is has gone from apathetic incompetence to malfeasance under this administration.
I offer that the fix is simple:
Shut down the VA. Put Veterans in the same healthcare program that congress gets. Make sure that Veterans always receive priority over congressmen.
Congress will insure that a Vet need never again wait for care.
Another thought rising from the VA scandal. Does it bother anyone else but me that federal employees get bonuses? There seems to be something amiss when an employee in the service of the taxpayer (at least theoretically) gets performance bonuses based on bureaucratic standards.
The mess and rot are so deep there’s no cleaning it up. Burn it. Burn Education. Burn Labor. Burn HUD. Burn SBA. Burn, baby, burn.
Because all the elites do it say they care and congratulate themselves for saying so:
“Three years ago, First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden started Joining Forces to show their appreciation for the incredible families across America who do so much for our country not just with words, but with real, concrete action.”
http://www.whitehouse.gov/joiningforces/
(This is Dr. Biden, the famous Dr. Biden!)
Is the phrase “not just with words” revealing. I mean, why say it. No duh! Is that a type of slip revealing guilt. Or just the opposite. A kind of jab because we all know the real way to change and transformation is with words.
The two shining examples of government health care are the VA and Indian reservations. Some would add active duty military.
T: that’s exactly what I was about to type. In the private sector, bonuses are a way to motivate employees to earn more wealth for the benefit of both themselves and their employers. Nobody’s earning any wealth in the public sector. Who benefits from the bonus besides the public employee? Certainly not the taxpayers or the VA patients.
As shown in this sorry example, the consequence of decoupling a bonus from the earning of wealth is to turn it into a means of encouraging dishonesty and ass-covering at the expense of competence and efficiency.
Mr. Frank: “Some would add active duty military.”
I’ve commented on that here in past threads. Battlefield traumas are well taken care of. Sick babies, impacted wisdom teeth, ruptured disks, thyroid problems, etc. not so much.
I like T’s idea: “Put Veterans in the same healthcare program that congress gets. Make sure that Veterans always receive priority over congressmen.” Capital idea! Am not holding my breath until it happens.
This scandal is merely an echo of NHS scandals in Britain.
It’s the NORM for single payer systems.
The dynamic always changes from…
attending patients to…
attending to problems.
You have invariant pay checks, awards, prestige…
In effect 100% taxation of marginal effort.
&&&
And then, this is a system that gets to bury its mistakes.
You wouldn’t even want to look at what’s up with the Indian Nations on the reservations.
Holder, the indispensable man.
Americans talked about how Hussein wasn’t using his own ObamaCare law, including Congress.
The hypocrisy doesn’t bother them, because they refuse to give their limited medical supplies and doctors to the children of veterans. They merely wish the veterans and their families to die off. That way, more medicine left for the DC regime’s kids.
How wide? Wider than the deep blue sea. Wider than the journey to the moon.
All this endless fiddling with/twisting/lying about statistics has been previewed in the British Parliament’s endless bun-fights about the National Health Service’s record of care (i.e., lack of). Whichever party is in power spends most of its time defending the NHS’s record on their watch, but nothing ever changes (cf. the Staffordshire hospital scandal — thousands dead).
Just watch the Prime Minister’s Question Time on CSpan, and you’ll see what our future holds. Horrible.
What we’re seeing is the transformation of medicine into a democrat jobs program. Just like government run education. Never mind they’re increasingly run by horribly incompetent people, because everybody will have insurance and all kids will go to school!
Who’s against healthcare and education?
This is the list of salaries of those employed at the VA hospital in Phoenix!
Hold onto your socks and fasten your safety belt for this one.
http://www.openthebooks.com/search/?PensionCode=840&F_fiscalyear=2013&F_Station=Phoenix&F_Name=&perpage=100
One of my sources say that the VA has their own union.
Roll the drums please. Unions are the hand maidens of obedience for the LA.
Doing my own dot connecting:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=Phoenix+Arizona+McCain+VA&go=&qs=n&form=QBLH&pq=target+focus+training&sc=8-18&sp=-1&sk=
I strongly suspect that McCain was given certain rewards for deals with Democrats, if the Phoenix listed in the top VA salaries )six figures( were in Arizona.
Oh what a web we weave, when we first practice to deceive.