Asking the Secretary to step down won't accomplish anything. The Secretary needs to decide to ask the President for a Special Prosecutor. The delays are suppose to have been resolved with extending services within the private health care network to existing wait list veterans.
May 28, 2014
By Richard A. Oppel, Jr. and Michael D. Shear
May 28, 2014
By Richard A. Oppel, Jr. and Michael D. Shear
The inspector general (click here) for the Department of Veterans Affairs reported on Wednesday that at least 1,700 veterans at the agency’s medical center in Phoenix were not registered on the proper waiting list to see doctors, creating a serious condition that means veterans “continue to be at risk of being forgotten or lost” in the convoluted scheduling process.
All the while, the hospital falsely reported waiting times that suggested delays were minimal, the report said.
The report prompted several leading Republicans, including Senator John McCain of Arizona, to call for the secretary of veterans affairs, Eric Shinseki, to step down.
“While our work is not complete, we have substantiated that significant delays in access to care negatively impacted the quality of care at this medical facility,” Richard J. Griffin, the acting inspector general for the department, said in an interim report on his investigation into the Phoenix medical center....
The VA hospitals involved were blind siding oversight. How is that implicating the Secretary?
May 28, 2014
By Akesh Houdek
...Improvements in oversight (click here) and auditing are surely part of the solution here, but there's a much more fundamental change that needs to happen: Regular line-level employees who see wrongdoing on the part of their coworkers, or are asked to engage in wrongdoing by their supervisors, need to be able to do something about it without threat of retaliation. Any human endeavor examined closely enough is a disgraceful mess, and most of us know this most directly from our jobs. But we also instantly recognize true malfeasance when we directly encounter it. So, of all the people who were involved or knew about these terrible practices who worked at the VA, why did it take so long for the truth to come out? A recent CNN report quotes Dr. Sam Foote, a doctor who had worked for the VA for 24 years....
...It's telling that Foote went to the press only after retiring. Despite the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989, the federal government during the Bush and Obama administrations has grown increasingly hostile to whistleblowers....
What improvements in oversight, they were erasing the records? It is difficult to make quality improvements when it is criminality one is dealing with.
...workers devised a solution that involved entering information into a computer screen, printing the screen, and then not saving the record....
They may have devised a solution, but, it wasn't legal. How is oversight suppose to pick up delays when all the records were erased except for a stake of papers no one authorized or knew existed. These formulated a solution and never sought approval for their solution. They simply went ahead and did what they wanted to do. This calls for resignations and purging the VA of incompetents, but, it doesn't start with the Secretary. It just doesn't.
Asking Secretary Shinseki to step down would be nothing short of scapegoating. What really bothers me, as this scandal unfolds, is the fact these problems were systemic to include something like 26 other facilities. That systemic problem proves there are deeper problems and it is in the leadership that seems to have gotten their way all to easily for too long. Who are in leadership, friends and family of those calling for the Secretary's resignation.
The problems have to be solved and it isn't going to happen of Secretary Shinseki is scapegoated for the sake of politics.
The VA hospitals involved were blind siding oversight. How is that implicating the Secretary?
May 28, 2014
By Akesh Houdek
...Improvements in oversight (click here) and auditing are surely part of the solution here, but there's a much more fundamental change that needs to happen: Regular line-level employees who see wrongdoing on the part of their coworkers, or are asked to engage in wrongdoing by their supervisors, need to be able to do something about it without threat of retaliation. Any human endeavor examined closely enough is a disgraceful mess, and most of us know this most directly from our jobs. But we also instantly recognize true malfeasance when we directly encounter it. So, of all the people who were involved or knew about these terrible practices who worked at the VA, why did it take so long for the truth to come out? A recent CNN report quotes Dr. Sam Foote, a doctor who had worked for the VA for 24 years....
...It's telling that Foote went to the press only after retiring. Despite the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989, the federal government during the Bush and Obama administrations has grown increasingly hostile to whistleblowers....
What improvements in oversight, they were erasing the records? It is difficult to make quality improvements when it is criminality one is dealing with.
...workers devised a solution that involved entering information into a computer screen, printing the screen, and then not saving the record....
They may have devised a solution, but, it wasn't legal. How is oversight suppose to pick up delays when all the records were erased except for a stake of papers no one authorized or knew existed. These formulated a solution and never sought approval for their solution. They simply went ahead and did what they wanted to do. This calls for resignations and purging the VA of incompetents, but, it doesn't start with the Secretary. It just doesn't.
Asking Secretary Shinseki to step down would be nothing short of scapegoating. What really bothers me, as this scandal unfolds, is the fact these problems were systemic to include something like 26 other facilities. That systemic problem proves there are deeper problems and it is in the leadership that seems to have gotten their way all to easily for too long. Who are in leadership, friends and family of those calling for the Secretary's resignation.
The problems have to be solved and it isn't going to happen of Secretary Shinseki is scapegoated for the sake of politics.
