There is an ingrained bureaucracy that has long permeated many of the aspects of how our government conducts its business. This is hardly news. While most of the programs are harmless insofar as life and death issues are concerned, every so often, the bureaucracy manages to do something that borders on the 
criminal. This is the case with how Veterans were treated by the VA.
In a CNN article (April 24, 2014) by Scott Bronstein and Drew Griffin entitled: “A fatal wait: Veterans languish and die on a VA hospital’s secret list,” we learn that:
“At least 40 U.S. veterans died waiting for appointments at the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care system, many of whom were placed on a secret waiting list. The secret list was part of an elaborate scheme designed by Veterans Affairs managers in Phoenix who were trying to hide that 1,400 to 1,600 sick veterans were forced to wait months to see a doctor top management at the VA hospital in Arizona knew about the practice and even defended it.”
The VA developed a policy that patients in need of care should be seen within 14 to 30 days of making an appointment. The bureaucracy of the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care System (and this policy apparently goes from the Director, down to the Associate Director, down to the Chief of Nursing down to who knows where?) decided to create a secret waiting list. In order to pull off the scheme, the bureaucrats played a life and death game that turned our valued veterans into chess pawns. Dr. Sam Foote, a physician who recently retired from the Phoenix VA told the authors of the article:
“…when a veteran comes in seeking an appointment, they enter information into the computer and do a screen capture hard copy printout. They (the “system”) then do not save what was put into the computer so there’s no record that you were ever here…so the only record that you have ever been there requesting care was on that secret list, and they wouldn’t take you off that secret list until you had an appointment time that was less than 14 days so it would give the appearance that they were improving greatly the waiting times, when in fact they were not.”
Not a game
It is one thing to try to make an appointment then get on the secret list if you have fallen arches or want a physician to prescribe a pill for insomnia, but what about internal bleeding or chest pain or a suspicious skin tumor? Would you have three months or six or a year? In fact, some veterans were shoved off to the secret list for as long as 21 months. Those waiting on the secret list officially didn’t exist. If a veteran died waiting for treatment, there was no record of the wait. That is correct; veterans of WWII or Korea or Vietnam or you name your war, even one who was internally bleeding with a cancer, did not officially exist, but was a name on the secret list.
It is easy for us to heap piles of rage on Sharon Helman, director of the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care System, and she deserves it, but she is hardly alone; extensive delays have been reported in VA systems in Georgia, South Carolina, Texas and Florida as well. Though Phoenix appears to be the worst, and was the most blatant in its arrogance, they have company and many are complicit. Including us, I am afraid.
Who is accountable?
How long have we heard the rhetoric about our veterans? Every new president, senator or congressman talks a good game, but why do the problems persist? Because no one is truly, ethically accountable.
We are all for giving veterans a standing ovation at football games and we cheer parades when we march them off to war, but what happens when they return “broken?” They often become inconvenient. They suddenly become burdens; many are no longer beautiful; their needs bother many of us. The Sharon Helman’s of the world find a bureaucracy and hides behind it, and she brings along her associates including those who once stood in lecture halls and recited the Hippocratic Oath.
There are hundreds of secret lists and secret agendas in government. It is what we have allowed to happen in every organization from the Agricultural Marketing Service to the White House Office of Administration. Usually they “just” drain money, but what happens when their games lead to loss of lives? What happens when their road show moves from “Inside the Beltway” to Phoenix, Arizona?
We must demand more from these bureaucrats. They work for us; we do not work for them. We can begin by insisting the 1,600 veterans on the secret waiting list in Phoenix get seen – now!
YOUR COMMENTS ARE WELCOME!
