Well, one thing John Boehner got right was his statement that the resignation of Eric Shinseki would not fix the mess at the VA. The four-star general with a lifetime of service in the military had the good grace to step down from his position as Veterans Affairs Secretary. No one should jump to the conclusion that he was in any way responsible for the deception and fraud in the VA system. He left his cabinet position because, in words, he “did not want to be a distraction.”
Read this snippet from Wikipedia and will learn a lot about this genuine hero. “Eric Ken Shinseki was born November 28, 1942 and is a retired US Army four-star general who served as the seventh United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs. His final U.S. Army post was as the 34th Chief of Staff of the Army (1999–2003). He is a veteran of two tours of combat in the Vietnam War, in which he was awarded three Bronze Stars for valor and a Purple Heart with an Oak Leaf Cluster. The latter honor was conferred during an operation in which he sustained an amputation of part of a foot from a landmine explosion while serving as a forward artillery observer. After spending almost a year recovering from his injuries, he returned to active duty in 1971.”
And that’s just the beginning. His career is totally remarkable but he had one problem. For those of us who have served in the military it is understood that when a superior gives you an order it is not open for discussion. It gets carried out. Granted, there may be much griping and grousing about it, but only the soldier who enjoys severe discipline disobeys it. Apparently that’s not true in the VA. General Shinseki’s problem has been that, despite his openness and encouragement to hear bad news, his underlings were unwilling to deliver it. Not only did they not tell the Secretary, they actively falsified records to hide the truth.
The problems with scheduling were uncovered by federal auditors in 2005 but that resulted in increased efforts for camouflage the truth about scheduling. By 2010 the VA had issued a memo of 17 workarounds to obscure the information from reaching the higher echelons of the VA bureaucracy.
Adding to the problem are two factors that increased the pressure to continue the subterfuge: The number of veterans seeking care increased by several million in the past five years. This is due to the number of new veterans from our seemingly endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but also cause of the aging population of veterans who have served decades ago.
The second part of the problem that has received scant coverage in the press is the severe shortage of physicians in the VA system. If you don’t have enough doctors to meet the demand in a timely fashion the delays will become horrendous. Since appointments were sometimes months away sick veterans swamped the emergency rooms of VA hospitals.
The scheduling clerks are at the lowest level of the VA system. They did what they were told to do and the compensation rewards sometimes were tied to their performance, or at least that is what we have been told.
In The Washington Post there is a recent article by David A. Fahrenhold entitled “How VA developed its culture of cover-ups.” It was reprinted in The Roanoke Times Sunday edition. After reading it there likely to be a lot of conclusions one can draw. The most obvious is that it will take a massive effort to unravel and then correct the problems. The second is that veterans certainly deserve priority treatment, not this kind of chicanery. Third, should we be so naïve as to think the VA is an isolated agency in the art of cooking the books, not just in government but in society as well?
The final thought is that General Shinseki should be remembered as a true hero. He, once again, has done the honorable thing that has marked his career: He has accepted responsibility for the poor performance of the VA system, but publically has continued to stand tall.
Hayden Hollingsworth
