America’s veterans deserve the best medical care money can buy.
But despite a $2 billion new facility, increased funding, and years of promises, the Department of Veterans Affairs isn’t even offering competent and consistent care in the Eastern Colorado Health Care System at this point.
The Denver Post’s Sam Tabachnik reported Sunday on a vast scandal of incompetence, cover-ups and misconduct at the VA system headquartered out of Aurora’s new hospital.
The allegations lodged by a dozen current and former employees are alarming and depressing.
And the real victims in this story are the estimated hundred thousand veterans relying on this system for their health care – veterans who were put on waiting lists by doctors for necessary medical equipment only to have the head of the department order employees to erase the orders to lessen the backlog.
The problems in the Prosthetic and Sensory Aids Service could be just the tip of the iceberg of dysfunction, given the level of complaints Tabachnik was able to track down and the culture of fear and reprisal described by employees.
The VA must act quickly.
Removing the system’s director and chief of staff pending an investigation from federal oversight officials is a start, but the VA cannot scapegoat two or three people for this scandal and call it good. Whistleblowers described a system in collapse where basic necessities were being intentionally unfilled and leaders were obsessed with protecting their image and reputation above all else.
The Denver Post documented an incident where early doses of the COVID vaccine were stored improperly after a fridge door was left open. An employee told The Post that rather than putting out a public plea so older at-risk veterans living nearby could come to the facility to get shots, the system’s leadership covered up the mistake, gave the shots to mostly hospital staff and urged employees not to say anything. One brave employee filed a report with the VA’s Office of Inspector General.
That the employee was never contacted erodes our confidence that the Department of Veterans Affairs will able to right the ship in Aurora without significant outside oversight and assistance. The VA also refused to comment about the investigation further eroding transparency and trust.
The scandal unfolding is painfully similar to the 2014 revelation that wait times for care, particularly in Arizona, had become dangerously long and worse, officials were keeping two logs of patients in order to disguise the magnitude of the problem.
That crisis resulted in real reform from the Obama administration, or at least so it seemed.
Here we are again, nine years later.
Republicans have long threatened to privatize the VA in response to these scandals and reports of substandard care. Today more veterans than ever are able to access care outside the VA free of charge using a successful waiver system called Veterans Choice.
That system must be opened up — cutting out the expensive middlemen — so that any time a veteran fails to get the care they need – whether it’s a needed prosthetic, a hearing aid or access to a specialist – he or she can immediately get the care outside the VA without going through a broken bureaucracy.
Veterans cannot be trapped in a system where they are forced to pay out of pocket for care that has been promised to them as part of the contract for their services. An escape hatch already exists, but it must be widened.
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