Lethal Corruption at the VA

Gingrich Productions
April 25, 2014
Newt Gingrich

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The list of senior Veterans Affairs officials who deserve to be thrown in jail for fraud keeps growing.

Several weeks ago I wrote about the VA employees in Los Angeles who intentionally destroyed veterans’ medical records in order to eliminate the shameful backlog of patients waiting for appointments–many of them for months or even years.

This week CNN followed that report of fraud with an infuriating story of its own, this one on the misconduct of VA officials in Phoenix. According to the report, these bureaucrats conspired to hide their backlog from superiors in Washington by maintaining a secret waiting list of hundreds or even thousands of veterans who waited months for care before the VA entered those patients into its computer system once it was able to schedule an appointment.

“There’s an ‘official’ list that’s shared with officials in Washington and shows the VA has been providing timely appointments, which [a former VA doctor] calls a sham list,” CNN’s Scott Bronstein and Drew Griffin report. “And then there’s the real list that’s hidden from outsiders, where wait times can last more than a year.”

“They would report to Washington, ‘Oh yeah. We’re makin’ our appointments within — within 10 days, within the 14-day frame,’” the doctor told CNN, “when in reality it had been six, nine, in some cases 21 months.”

Many of the veterans on the secret list are in urgent need of care, and at least forty in the Phoenix area have died waiting for an appointment with a doctor at the VA. The CNN report tells of one disabled veteran, Thomas Breen, who went to the VA for emergency treatment after noticing blood in his urine in September 2013. The VA added him to the secret waiting list for an appointment and sent him home. Of course, he should have seen a doctor immediately. But although he and his family phoned the VA on a daily basis, arguing that Thomas urgently needed help, they got nowhere.

Thomas died of undiagnosed bladder cancer at the end of November 2013. A week later, the VA called back and offered him the appointment he’d needed ten weeks sooner.

The level of callousness, deceit, and arrogance required in this scheme to shield VA bureaucrats from accountability at the expense of our veterans’ health is breathtaking. And likely criminal.

But sadly, as the deleted medical records in Los Angeles suggest, it is also far from isolated.

In February, a former VA director in Ohio pled guilty to 64 charges related to corruption– crimes, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, that included “money laundering, wire fraud, mail fraud and conspiring to defraud the VA through bribery and kickback schemes in which he accepted tens of thousands of dollars from contractors in exchange for inside information.”

An Office of Special Counsel investigation last year found that doctors in a Mississippi VA facility routinely prescribed narcotics to patients they never saw, under the instruction of the hospital’s director.

The VA claims its obscene backlogs result in part from a lack of funding. Yet even as veterans wait months or years for an appointment, the bureaucrats entrusted with their care are wasting the funding the VA already has (a budget nearly ten times the size of NASA’s).

John Sepulveda, a former assistant secretary of the VA, pled the Fifth at a Congressional hearing last year at which he was asked to explain why the department wasted millions on luxurious “conferences”–free trips–for its employees.

If you want to see how bad the corruption at the VA is, just take a look at the list of press releases on the VA Inspector General’s website. They have dozens of headlines like, “Former VA Employee Pleads Guilty to Theft of Government Funds,” “Former VA Claims Examiner Pleads Guilty to Theft, Mail Fraud and Money Laundering,” and “Veterans’ Benefit Fiduciary and Former U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Employee plead Guilty to Embezzling Nearly $900,000.”

Despite it all, the bureaucrats in charge have been giving themselves large bonuses. Between 2007 and 2011, the VA distributed nearly $17 million in “extra compensation” to senior officials at a time when hundreds of thousands of veterans’ claims were backlogged.

It has become increasingly obvious to most Americans in recent years that the federal bureaucracy is riddled with large pockets of corruption, from the IRS to the Department of Health and Human Services. Many of the cases we know about are outrageous examples of waste and abuse of power. But abusing power and wasting funds at the expense of America’s veterans may be the most appalling kind of corruption yet.

http://www.gingrichproductions.com/2014/04/lethal-corruption-at-the-va