Faith in Agency Clouded Bernie Sanders’s V.A. Response

Faith in Agency Clouded Bernie Sanders’s V.A. Response

By STEVE EDER and DAVE PHILIPPS at the NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/us/politics/faith-in-agency-clouded-bernie-sanderss-va-response.html?_r=0

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Despite mounting evidence of trouble at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Senator Bernie Sanders, then the chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, initially regarded the complaints as overblown, and as a play by conservatives to weaken one of the country’s largest social welfare institutions.

“There is, right now, as we speak, a concerted effort to undermine the V.A.,” Mr. Sanders said in May 2014, two weeks after the story was picked up by national news organizations. “You have folks out there now — Koch brothers and others — who want to radically change the nature of society, and either make major cuts in all of these institutions, or maybe do away with them entirely.”


But the scandal deepened: The secretary of veterans affairs resigned. Reports showed major problems at dozens of V.A. hospitals. And an Obama administration review revealed “significant and chronic systemic leadership failures” in the hospital system.



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