If a patient waited for 8 years, seems to me this scandal started under Bush.

Obama's scandal??"...yes..8 years, who was in charge 8 years ago?
Who started this horrible situation?...

finish the oath of office you are responsible for what happens on your watch, regardless of when it began. Besides, President Obama was briefed on VA problems during the transition.


"White House spokesman Jay Carney says the commander in chief was unaware of these allegations until news of the Phoenix VA scandal hit. But according to a memo obtained by the Washington Times, Obama's transition team briefed him on the issue before he took office. The document noted that scheduling problems were "systemic throughout" the VA medical system and that the agency had made "only limited progress in addressing" issues such as the "accuracy of reported waiting times, and completeness of electronic waiting lists."


http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/05/veterans-affairs-backlogs-waiting-lists-george-bush

October 5th, 2007:

"It's not enough to lay a wreath on Memorial Day, or to make a speech on Veteran's Day," Obama said. "When a veteran is denied health care, we are all dishonored. When 400,000 veterans are stuck on a waiting list for claims, we need a new sense of urgency in this country. And when we've got young veterans of a misguided war in Iraq sleeping on the streets of our cities and towns, we need a change in Washington."

"Obama said that he will improve medical care for veterans and help eliminate bureaucratic backlogs that delay disability claims by making sure that every service-member has individual electronic medical and service records that immediately transfer to the (VA) system. Obama also said he will hire additional VA claims raters and set up programs to get homeless veterans off the streets."

"Obama said that he will improve medical care for veterans and help eliminate bureaucratic backlogs that delay disability claims by making sure that every service-member has individual electronic medical and service records that immediately work with the (VA) system. Obama also said he will hire additional VA claims raters and convert all veterans' benefits paperwork into electronic records to speed up applications. Finally, Obama said he will establish a zero tolerance policy for vets falling into homelessness."

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=93227

midterms, likely more than anything else.

it needs to get fixed....ASAP.

My take on this inexcusable VA mess is pretty simple. If you`re the president or an elected member of Congress and you have been in favor of war deployment, you had better stand tall and promise the voters you`ll take care of the vets....the men and women who fight their wars so their kids don`t have to. Not pretend take care of, but REALLY take care of.

Obviously, looking at this VA scandal, it`s easy to conclude there`s a lot of lip service coming out of Washington. They can buy all the flag pins they want, but a vet struggling and suffering for months while he/she waits for those in charge to do something....ANYTHING.... is inexcusable.

In late April, my partner was a patient at the Brockton VA for nearly three weeks for brain radiation. Many, many vets have to travel a great distance because the treatment they need is not available closer to home. As bad as things are right now for us, we`ve seen vets facing much worse. They need help and they deserve everything they get.

~PEACE~

Yes, it started long before Obama took office. But it continued while he was in office. Do you understand? This is a scandal for all of the administrations for the last 100 years. But it is also a scandal for the Obama administration.

...remember, the hole was WAY to deep to climb out of in less than six years, perhaps deep enough to take 10 or 12 or more years.

Two things to remember:

1 - the overall backlog is SHORTER now than it was a few years ago. It's not cleaned up totally, but it has improved.
2 - the House of Representatives is responsible for appropriating money to the VA and attempts to clean up the backlog. As we all know, they have conducted a concerted campaign to block anything that Obama attempts to do to improve anything, including the pathetic state of the VA.

The Obama administration and the VA lied not only about the extent of the systemic corruption and negligence but also about the consequences they had on the veterans themselves. Investigations into misconduct were concluded by admitting partially to the misconduct but not admitting to the consequences.

That is by all reasonable definitions a coverup. And I don't care under what administration that occurs. It's wrong and it's inexcusable.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/23/politics/veterans-care-va-report/index.html?iref=allsearch

In addition to head MSW (Master's Degree in Social Work).

He retired 30 years ago and had already seen some of the crap that is just now surfacing.

He bemoaned Reagan's decision to empty the mental hospitals and this greatly detracted from the hospital's ability to care for its charges because if not from the state or federal hospitals, it meant the VA was a veteran's last chance for serious mental health care.

My father further stated that because of the VA's inadequate mental health beds, this was a large reason why there were so many Vietnam veterans living on the streets.

Unforeseen consequences or trying to save a buck?

Knowing it was Reagan, I'd say the latter.

he took office. Congress will not help with enough funding to get the darn job done already.

Our Vets have been ripped off on mental health treatments, family assistance, even their grant money for education has been taken from some Vets by scam schools. Obama had to help Vets effected by agent orange, those Vets should have been helped decades ago!

Its ridiculous how much fraud there is when 'free' federal money is involved. There needs to be a Federal reward system for whistle blowers. Not just 'protection'.

Who ever was in charge of Veterans lack of proper care, the Doctors in charge, the management/contractor management, should be put in jail.

VA system can have the best system in the world but this mess would have still happened and will continue to if the system users and those that oversee it are worthless knuckleheads trying to line their pocket$. Hidden PAPER lists were the problem as is entering misleading info into the computer system.

Already this admin has saved billions in fraud that has happened for many decades in our Federal agencies.

Some are caught outright, others just stop defrauding because they know the old paper system is no longer used.

I think it was a good move by President Obama to fire many of the VA leadership right away, who committed outright fraud. They need Federal charges and jail.

Obama accepted the resignation of his person in charge of the Va. program. The man in charge of our VA- should have known something was wrong based on complaints from our Vets.

An entire state (Alabama) was defrauding our Vets for a very long time. I'm sure some of those Vets/families have complained for years.

edited to place in, what about all the VA Doctors? these Vets are their personal patients why didn't some/any of the Doctors speak-up when they knew their VA patients needed healthcare?

Having worked at a VA for the last 4 years I can tell you the unofficial motto said by it's health care workers when things are going terribly wrong and keep going wrong no matter how you try to fix the system..."It's the VA way".

That and "some of these people would not last 2 weeks in a private sector hospital". That is said about the ones who exert more energy avoiding work responsibilities than actually DOING THEIR JOB. They are the ones who will be there til the day they retire....the ones VA hospitals shuffle from dept to dept instead of firing. We had a nursing tech who verbally abused a patient to the point the patient said he feared for his safety. There were witnesses. Did she get fired? No, she got sent down to equipment sterile processing for 2 weeks til things cooled down and is now back doing patient care. Then there is a clerical worker who is rude to patients and nasty to co workers. They've run out of wards to transfer him to so his boss said that the worker will have to be sent "to the basement somewhere" because he has been banned from so many places in the facility.

An email was sent out recently that the VA and OIG found a worker who was claiming injury on the job money for FOUR years yet that worker was working elsewhere outside the VA collecting a paycheck without reporting it to the VA. The person pled guilty. FOUR YEARS. And it went unnoticed.

Another worker I know was going to retire with disability pay but was telling co workers he was going to open a business but not use his name in the finances so he could collect his disability pay from the VA and still be working/making money.

The whole system needs to be taken over from top to bottom....there is no accountability and the crappy workers know it. Sure, you can try to report them but nothing happens and they stay around and get revenge on the people who turned them in.

No one is doing anything without recompence, believe me. Stealing money from taxpayers and lining their pockets. It has to have been going on for ages. Clean house and go after assets.

and what isn't a scandal is his fault.
I thought everyone around here knew that

of his administration, he's not responsible.

In year 5, his administration is -- especially since they are just finding out about it.

....2004.

Has everyone forgotten about the Walter Reed Medical Center scandal?

Things are MUCH better than they were back then. Not perfect, but better. As I said, it was horrible a decade ago, and with the resources the republican congress has given him, Obama has made excellent progress.

VA staffing is horrible on ALL inpatient wards. They think having 3 nurses for 21 patients is ok...IF we are lucky, they will close our ward to new admissions....usually they don't do that and just say each nurse can have 6 or 7 patients. Keep in mind they don't acknowledge the very acutely ill or the chronc total care patients who are on the ward. If we get just a little breathing room with staffing within minutes they are calling us to pull staff to another floor. More often than not we either have no nursing techs on the floor or maybe one for 18 or 20 patients.
They need to expand their independent investigation to the inpatient non-psych wards. And don't announce when they will arrive because staffing suddenly gets wonderful when the execs know Joint Commission or OIG is in the house.
Just show up and ask to see like 3 months of past staffing grids..raw data. Make sure to ask for the acuity level of all the patients that were on floor at the time of the grids. News flash....execs will give you a blank panicked stare because they have NO CLUE about patient acuity. Ask how many total care patients were present. You will get more blank stares.

And yes, quality of care plummets in these scenarios. You have time to throw pills at someone, give some IV meds, keep their bottoms as clean and dry (though sometimes not as often as we want to) and pray there are enough relief staff coming...and that the relief staff are not the chronic late workers who stroll in at whatever time they want.

What a great job!

....the republicans came out with a long list of defense programs that Kerry voted to discontinue years earlier, saying he was "weak on defense".

What they DIDN'T say was that something like 85 senators also voted the same way, and the discontinued programs were recommended by the Defense Secretary at the time. Who was that? None other than DICK CHENEY!

He recommended something, Kerry agreed and voted for it, and Cheney criticized him for it. That's just the way they work. Total slime.

VA gets their funding a year ahead of time, in bulk. By the time sequestering happened, they already had their funding in place.
Each time there was a threat of gov shutdown or an actual shutdown, an email was sent out telling hospital workers not to worry because VA funding was already in place and the "only" dept effected would be the research.

The Feds need to do more than hand over a huge ass fund to the VA system. They need to get independent investigators down to the bottom of the food chain so workers can start seeing that there will be on the job accountability and not a guaranteed for life job where you get away with mistreating patients and coworkers.

One of worst sayings I've heard at our facility is "it's who you pay or who you lay" when it comes to moving up or bad behavior getting covered up.

We need the VA to have a quota on non-vets employed. We vets would have raised a fuss about how these guys were treated. Maybe that is why the VA, while required to consider them, hires so few.

Which I never understood. You would think they would be the first giving quality care and weeding out the bad apples.
Instead, many have the mentality of the job is owed them nothing they do will get them fired.
I've had one particularly lazy, irresponsible, manipulative co worker get away with things for years...when there is even a hint of him possibly getting in trouble he reaches down to his badge and olds up the "Army veteran" tag attached to it.
I've said all along that the VA needs to get a stack of job applications from vets returning home and when a current vet worker repeatedly behaves as the one I mentioned, show them the stack of applications and say "yes we are firing you and we will be hiring a vet who needs a job".