VA Administration Debacle Began Under George W. Bush

Chimperator George W. Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney and their allies in the Republican Party were quick to send American military members into battle on fool's errands - many in the Congressional GOP remain more than happy to do so - but when it comes to caring for those wounded in their orchestrated debacles, they lost they eagerness.  Indeed, remember the lack of vehicles with proper armor to protect against IED's?  As Mother Jones reports, the Veterans Administration debacle that the GOP is trying to tie to Barack Obama in fact began under his predecessor Chimperator George W. Bush.  In addition, the Congressional Republicans have been only too happy to cut VA funding.  Here are story highlights:

[A]ccording to VA inspector general reports and other documents that have gone overlooked in the current firestorm, federal officials knew about the scheme at the heart of the scandal—falsifying VA records to cover up treatment delays—years before Obama became president. VA officials first learned of the problems in 2005, when George W. Bush was entering his second term, and the problems went unfixed for the duration of his presidency.

The underlying issues date back even further. In 1995, as part of a broader overhaul, the VA began pressing clinics to cut wait times for new patient appointments to 30 days. But there was no system for tracking which facilities were meeting this target until 2002, when the VA introduced electronic waiting lists to keep tabs on patients who couldn't be seen within a month. Managers who slashed wait times were given bonuses and other perks. This created an incentive to game the system, especially after veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars began flooding into VA clinics and straining their already stretched resources.

The efforts to mask delays burst into public view last month, when CNN reported that at least 40 patients—many of whom never made it onto electronic waiting lists—had died while awaiting care from the VA system in Phoenix.

[A]ccusations are eerily similar to the findings of a 2005 VA inspector general's report that documented a raft of violations—including the widespread use of paper lists in place of the electronic ones to hide the glut of veterans awaiting appointments.

Two years later, another inspector general audit found that the VA had failed to act on these recommendations and that schedulers were still using paper lists and other tactics to mask the backlogs.

After the 2007 audit, the inspector general's office continued to field complaints about schedulers cooking the books. In 2008, then-Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii), the chairman of the Senate Committee of Veteran Affairs, asked the inspector general to investigate allegations that supervisors at VA facilities in North Florida and South Georgia were "manipulating their waiting list." The IG later received an anonymous tip alleging that managers in the Portland VA hospital were instructing employees "to use paper wait lists to hide the access problems," which had created a backlog of more than 3,500 patients in one clinic alone.

Politicians and pundits have seized on this as evidence that the Obama administration dropped the ball. And Robert Petzel, the undersecretary of health for Veterans Affairs, was forced to step down after being confronted with the memo during a congressional hearing earlier this month. But the 2010 memo shows that the VA took some steps to solve the problem. Schoenhard called on VA network directors across the country to take "immediate action" to "identify and eliminate" the gaming strategies and offered detailed instructions for detecting these schemes, which he warned "will not be tolerated."

Other veterans organizations, meanwhile, are wary of pinning blame on a single official or administration. "This is not a new problem," says Rick Weidman, executive director of government affairs at Vietnam Veterans of America. "But the media latched onto the idea of 'secret lists' and suddenly it exploded. Instead of buying into the hysteria and finger pointing, we should be addressing root problems."