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American Legion calls on VA chief to resign
The American Legion, the nation's largest veterans service group, called Monday on Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki to resign, citing reports of delayed medical care, patient deaths and performance bonuses for officials linked to health care and other management problems.

"It's a story of poor oversight and failed leadership," said American Legion Cmdr. Daniel Dellinger, who also hailed the former Army chief of staff's decorated military record. "This is the most difficult thing I've ever had to do."

Other major veterans groups did not make the same demand for a leadership change, but all expressed growing outrage over allegations that many veterans have been harmed -- and some have died -- because of delays in cancer screening tests and other types of medical care.

Paul Rieckhoff, chief executive officer and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said he would survey members about whether Shinseki should resign.
"I will tell you that there's a lot of anger, there's a lot of disappointment and a lot of frustration across the country. It seems like one catastrophic story after another (relating to delays in medical care)," Rieckhoff said. "What everyone agrees is that there's been a failure of leadership and accountability and oversight."

The VA responded late Monday, highlighting progress under Shinseki's leadership in reducing veteran homelessness and a backlog of compensation claims, enrolling 1 million veterans under new education benefits and 2 million in the VA's healthcare system.

VA press secretary Drew Brookie said that if allegations about patient care and employee misconduct are substantiated "swift and appropriation action will be taken."

"Secretary Shinseki has dedicated his life to his fellow veterans, and nobody is more committed to completing the work that lies ahead," Brookie said.

A White House statement Monday expressed confidence in Shinseki's "ability to lead the department and to take appropriate action."

The Veterans of Foreign Wars -- the largest organization of combat veterans -- and the Disabled American Veterans both declined to call for Shinseki to step down. But leaders of both groups also voiced concerns about the slow delivery of health care.

"It is imperative that the VA respond quickly, forcefully and publicly to these reports and answer questions about whether similar problems are threatening other VA facilities or the system as a whole," said Garry Augustine, DAV Washington executive director.

"Secretary Shinseki (must) get publicly in front of this immediately to address the valid concerns of veterans and their families and to reestablish the credibility of the entire VA health and benefits systems, and that of his own office," said VFW National Commander William A. Thien.

Dellinger also asked that Shinseki's top two administrators step down — Robert Petzel, undersecretary of health, and Allison Hickey, undersecretary for benefits.

The American Legion has 2.4 million members and 14,000 posts worldwide.

The harsh criticism across the board stood in contrast to even recent praise from veterans groups as the VA demonstrated success in areas such as reducing its backlog of compensation claims or veteran homelessness.

Tom Tarantino, policy director for the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, described Shinseki late last year in an interview with The Washington Post as a "transformational figure."

Rieckhoff revised those comments Monday, saying that "he's transformational, But the question is can he transform the (VA ) culture? And so far the points are not on the board."

Veterans groups have grown increasingly impatient with reports that delays in cancer screenings by the VA may be linked with 23 deaths in recent years or statement by a retired doctor who allege that slow medical responses at a VA hospital in Phoenix are linked to 40 deaths at that facility.

Petzel has said no evidence has been found to support those allegations, but the VA Inspector General's Office is investigating the Phoenix situation.

USA TODAY reported Sunday that an internal VA investigation found that clerks at a VA clinic in Fort Collins, Colo., were trained in how to falsify records to cover up delays in care.

Dellinger, who took office in August, said he remained a strong supporter of Shinseki as recently as a month ago. But he said too many problems regarding oversight of health care have since mushroomed.

"The entire system seems to be infected," Dellinger said.

The American Legion issued a document outlining more than two dozen cases of VA medical officials receiving bonuses despite problems in medical care or the delivery of other VA services such as compensation benefits.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/natio...h-care/8730617/

The administration should individually audit each VA Hospital in the country, veterans deserve world class medical care. This is yet another Obama appointment failure.

Long , Long , Long time ago, the VA system should had been dissolved .. Expensive , run a muck govt money pit with lousy results .. Vet should get a Govt. credit card and use the Doc/hospital of his choice .. Reduced cost , better treatments ! Of course the Govt would loose some control and we would get to reduce a bunch of Govt. workers ... .. Bottom line the VET Wins ..

Would this really work? Has there been any studies or any governments that have done this? It does sound interesting.

You're right. I can show links going back through past presidents showing the exact same issues. Maybe we should have called for all of their resignations too?

I know from my father being in a VA hospital in the 60's it goes back at least that far. My wife is a nurse and she says the conditions are horrible and there is no way she'd work in a VA hospital.

jc...



And the masses want our government to control our healthcare. Is the VA not a perfect example of why they should not?

Exactly. VA facilities are perfect example of government mismanagement. Everything you do with them is bogged down in red tape and inefficiency. I deal with them quite regularly in my job, and it's quite hilarious trying to get anything accomplished. I'd like to post one of the patient transfer forms here for a good laugh. Even the VA people don't know how to fill them out correctly, and they deny patients because we didn't. They are much better off in our facility anyway.

I see the blame it on Bush crew is still going strong. I guess that will remain the liberal war cry for years to come. Hopefully the Vets will get the care they deserve.

People never factor this cost into wars, sadly. We have so many people that want us to be the world's police and jump into so many crises. I read an incredible story the other day and I can't remember where (it may have even been linked on here) that we are still paying one veteran's pension from the Civil War. (Here is the link from WSJ)) Those benefits, plus VA costs should give pause to anybody preaching additional military incursions. Sadly, they simply don't.

Truth.

The VA has sucked - at the very least - since 1993 when I got off active duty and began to have the "pleasure" of dealing with them.

Anyone that has EVER dealt with the VA was probably VERY vocal about not allowing our government to get involved in our health scare system.

You don't blame a current regime for problems that have been there for years, but they certainly can be called to task for ignoring them.

It's a shame. The VA hospitals were running so smoothly and efficiently before Obama entered the White House.

On a serious note...anyone else notice that as far as successors go, presidents have gotten incrementally worse and worse?

Maybe it's time to blame the system in which these guys are cogs, and not every other administration?

jc

wow....the va has been crap for decades, and its obama's fault now?

some of you guys are seriously jokes. if your wife cheated on you, it be obama's fault, too.

VA's ability to quickly provide benefits plummets under Obama
The Department of Veterans Affairs has failed to provide key information to Congress and the public that shows the agency’s ability to quickly provide service-related benefits has virtually collapsed under President Barack Obama.

Internal VA documents, obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting and authenticated by the agency, reveal that delays newly returning veterans face before receiving disability compensation and other benefits are far longer than the agency has publicly acknowledged. The documents also offer insight into some of the reasons for those delays.

The agency tracks and widely reports the average wait time: 273 days. But the internal data indicates that veterans filing their first claim, including those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, wait nearly two months longer, between 316 and 327 days. Those filing for the first time in America’s major population centers wait up to twice as long – 642 days in New York, 619 days in Los Angeles and 542 days in Chicago.

The ranks of veterans waiting more than a year for their benefits grew from 11,000 in 2009, the first year of Obama’s presidency, to 245,000 in December – an increase of more than 2,000 percent.

As a candidate, Obama had promised to revamp a “broken VA bureaucracy,” but the documents reveal that many of the administration’s attempts – including efforts to boost staffing and computerize claims processing – have fallen apart in the implementation. Calls to the White House press office were not returned.
“I’m not surprised at the number of us that kill ourselves,” said Lincoln Capstick, an unemployed Iraq War veteran in Indiana, where the average wait on new claims is 612 days.

Capstick said his electricity was cut off three times while he waited for the VA to grant a disability claim for traumatic brain injury, headaches and a variety of leg and knee injuries sustained when a military contractor’s SUV ran him over in the desert near the Iraq-Kuwait border.

“There were periods where I thought of killing myself,” Capstick said. “You just get so hopeless.” According to the VA, 22 veterans commit suicide every day.

In Washington, U.S. Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said he was not surprised that the VA’s internal documents painted a much gloomier picture than the agency’s public pronouncements.

“One of the biggest oversight challenges we’ve encountered is just getting VA to engage in an honest conversation,” Miller said.

The agency’s biggest problem, he said, is a “culture of complacency.”

The VA downplayed the importance of the internal documents.

The agency still intends to meet its goal of resolving nearly all claims within four months by 2015, VA spokesman Joshua Taylor said. He blamed the skyrocketing delays on a 50 percent increase in the number of claims filed, a combination of an uptick in returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and Vietnam veterans requesting compensation for illnesses newly connected to Agent Orange. The VA also has made it easier for veterans to file claims for PTSD and Gulf War illness, Taylor said.

In a separate emailed statement, the agency also argued that it “consistently provides our numbers during Congressional hearings and briefings. What is not available online or in these reports is generally available on request.”

The VA typically takes months to respond to the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Freedom of Information Act requests, often stating that information requested must be manually tabulated. Yet the internal documents show the agency tracks its performance at an extremely granular level of detail. The agency also failed to provide this information to attorneys in Veterans for Common Sense v. Shinseki, a federal class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. The lawsuit died when the Supreme Court refused to review the appeal in January.

“They have a lot more detailed information than we were led to believe,” said Ryan Hassanein, a partner at Morrison & Foerster, the law firm that represented the veterans.

Lawmakers who have been working on the issue said they hadn’t seen the documents before.

Rep. Mike Thompson, a California Democrat and Vietnam veteran, joined other members of the Northern California delegation to meet with senior VA officials Feb. 27 to discuss the issue. He said VA officials have told him they are making slow but steady progress.

“I’m not going to be an apologist for the president or for the VA,” Thompson said, “but this was a long festering mess when they came in. I think they have made improvements.”

The VA’s internal documents tell a different story. They show that the average wait time for veterans filing disability claims fell by more than a third under President George W. Bush, even as more than 320,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans filed disability claims.

The documents show delays escalated only after Obama took office and have more than doubled since, as 455,000 more returning veterans filed their claims.

Hearings on the backlog are planned in the House and Senate veterans’ affairs committees, with the Senate hearing scheduled for Wednesday.

“VA is at a day of reckoning,” said Paul Sullivan, a Gulf War veteran and former senior VA project manager who now works for the Washington, D.C.-area law firm Bergmann & Moore. The agency, he said, “needs to publicly come forward and disclose the severity of the claims delay and error crisis, because Congress can’t fix it until VA is forthcoming about all their symptoms.”

The documents obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting shed light on why the agency is failing to make headway despite public and political pressure and its own promises.

They show that while the agency has spent four years and $537 million on a new computer system, 97 percent of all veterans’ claims remain on paper. Since those numbers were tallied by the agency in January, the VA’s two top technology officers have announced their resignations, saying they had accomplished their goals.

On Feb. 27, the agency’s principal deputy undersecretary for benefits also announced he was quitting.

In interviews, workers at five VA offices said they were exhausted by the ever-growing piles of paperwork, with files becoming so thick that employees frequently have asked veterans to resend medical records or military service documents simply because the claims workers could not locate them.

Cindy Indof, who handles appeals at the VA office in Columbia, S.C., said it is not uncommon for her to see the same medical information in a veteran’s claim repeated two or even three times. The growth in paperwork, she said, is compounded by a points system that gives performance bonuses to workers for sending letters to veterans but not for spending extra time reading a claims file.

Taylor, the VA spokesman, said the computer system would be launched at all regional offices by the end of the year. “The transition is under way. We’re at the midpoint. We’re not at the endpoint yet,” he said.

The agency’s public pronouncements about hiring 3,300 additional claim processors since 2010 to cope with the influx of returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans also were misleading, the documents show.

Because of turnover and the loss of more than 2,000 workers temporarily paid through stimulus funds, staffing at the VA’s 58 regional offices actually has increased by fewer than 300 people since September 2010 – even as the volume of new claims increased dramatically.

At a majority of the regional offices – including those in New York; Chicago; Los Angeles; Waco, Texas; and Oakland, Calif. – the VA employs fewer people than it did two years ago, according to the VA’s internal documents.

“You have a workforce that is completely burnt out, and there is no help in sight,” said Darren Foster, a Gulf War veteran who worked for the VA for 15 years before leaving in October. He now processes workers’ compensation claims for the Labor Department, in an office that he says is more efficient and better managed.

“It was a hard decision to leave,” Foster said. “I love helping veterans. But I just couldn’t do it anymore.”
http://cironline.org/reports/vas-ability-quickly-provide-benefits-plummets-under-obama-4241

Since we're swapping opinions.

Republicans derail Senate veterans bill

By JUANA SUMMERS | 2/27/14 5:30 PM EST Updated: 2/28/14 12:24 PM EST

Senate Republicans on Thursday derailed a sweeping $21 billion bill that would have expanded medical, educational and other benefits for veterans — in another chapter of the ongoing feud over amendments, spending and new sanctions on Iran.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) moved Wednesday night to cut off debate on the bill and blocked consideration of amendments, including one on Iran sanctions demanded by Republicans. And on Thursday, Democrats came up four votes short of the 60 needed to keep the bill moving forward on a procedural budget vote, 56-41.

“I thought that maybe, just on this issue, this Senate could come together and do the right thing for our veterans,” Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told reporters after the bill was sent back to his committee.

”I am going to keep going on this. We are not going to give up on our veterans,” he vowed. “At some point, we are going to pass this legislation.”

Members of both parties are typically reticent to oppose legislation designed to help veterans and their families, but the downfall of Sanders’s bill underscored the frosty relations in the Senate and Congress at large, where it’s been tough to get much done.

Just two Republicans, Sens. Jerry Moran of Kansas and Dean Heller of Nevada crossed party lines and joined Democrats in their bid to move the bill forward.

Reid, who blocked the Iran amendment and others, blamed Republicans for more obstructionism and killing a bill that would have helped the nation’s 22 million veterans and their families.

Reid said he hoped veterans’ groups were watching the lengths Republicans had gone to “to defeat this bill, because it will be defeated.”

“That was their aim from the very beginning,” Reid said on the Senate floor.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and other Republicans, though, have charged that Democrats were pushing the legislation purely out of election-year politics.

And Democrats didn’t waste time capitalizing on the moment.

Just minutes after the bill was derailed, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee blasted McConnell, who is facing a tough reelection fight back home, as choosing the “partisan political gridlock that reminded Kentuckians of how he represents everything that’s wrong with Washington” and as being “not on the side of veterans and military families.”

Republicans have charged the bill was too expensive and disputed the way it would be paid for with overseas contingency operations funds used to fund the war in Afghanistan. And that, Republicans argued, wouldn’t amount to real savings, since the money wouldn’t have been spent anyway with the war winding down by year’s end.

By blocking an Iran vote, the Republicans said, Reid was protecting the president from a potentially embarrassing vote.

“What Reid would like to do is take all the votes and push them past the November election,” said North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, the veterans’ committee’s top Republican.

Sanders, though, told reporters he resented “very much the implication that this was political.”

“The point of the matter is if we had won today … both parties could have gone out and said we finally overcame all of the partisanship we see here in Washington,” Sanders said. “This could have been a political winner, if you like, and certainly a public policy winner for both Democrats and Republicans.”

Reid, meanwhile, charged that by pushing the sanctions provision — offered by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) — Republicans were putting ongoing negotiations in jeopardy, echoing the view of the administration.

“There’s too much at stake to play politics with our nation’s Iran policy,” Reid said.

Heritage Action urged lawmakers to vote ‘no’ on the bill,saying it “fails to make necessary reforms to the VA system that is already overburdened and flawed, harming both veterans truly in need of assistance and taxpayers in the process.”

The measure, solidly supported by more than two dozen veterans groups, would have authorized the Department of Veterans Affairs to open or expand more than two dozen medical centers across the country. It also would extend the life of a program that offers care for veterans with mild to severe brain injuries and make more veterans eligible for in-state tuition at public universities.

The bill would also have restored the cost-of-living military pension cuts for new recruits this year; Congress already restored the cuts for others.

Veterans’ advocates worried the vote, compounded with the earlier move to cut pensions in last year’s budget deal, might be a sign of their waning clout on Capitol Hill, even in an election year.

The vote “makes clear that veterans are no longer immune from gridlock and political gains,” one aide said, adding this was a “big bill for the community.”

“Republicans blame Democrats, Democrats blame Republicans and veterans are caught in the crossfire,” Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America founder and CEO Paul Rieckhoff said. “Veterans don’t have time for this nonsense.”

And American Legion National Commander Daniel Dellinger said the vote displayed the “same political gamesmanship that led our federal government to a shutdown last fall.”

“There was a right way and a wrong way to vote today, and 41 senators voted the wrong way. That’s inexcusable,” Dellinger said. “I don’t know how anyone who voted no today can look a veteran in the eye and justify that vote.”

I don't know if this report or the one before it posted by Millcreek is accurate. I don't intend to dig into either.

But, kids go into the military, they know they may be asked to fight. Most times in a war that they themselves don't fully understand. But they do it anyway. They follow orders, do the job they were trained to do.

At the VERY least, we owe them solid medical care, educational benefits that help them build a future.

They should not EVER be used as pawns in any argument for or against ANYTHING.

Those elected officials that use them in this fashion, regardless of party, should be banned from EVER serving in office again..

For me, it's just that simple.

Quote:

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Yet you blamed 50+ years of mismanagment at the VA on one Obama appointee! LOL

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And rather than say that FIRST, you decided to go with the "He inherited a mess from Bush" response..

Every President inherits a host of problems when he takes office.. from that point he owns them and it is his job to fix them.. Still trying to figure out which ones are getting fixed...

This is all Woodrow Wilson's fault

It's about time we got to the bottom of this !

Absolutely!

If there's any bi-partisanship it should be ANYTHING having to do with providing veterans any benefit manageable.

This agency is literally stuck in the last century.

I agree. I don't really care who is at fault, this is one thing that we should prioritize and fix ASAP. Our veterans, and especially our injured veterans, (those with injuries you can see, and those with injuries you can't see) deserve the care they have been promised. Put politics aside and take care of our soldiers and veterans.