The ever-expanding scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs didn’t just materialize out of thin air in the last few weeks. Problems with inadequate care and life-threatening waiting lines have been reported for years, and the prevaricator-in-chief damn well knows it: Obama warned about VA wait-time problems during 2008 transition ~

Veterans Affairs officials warned the Obama-Biden transition team in the weeks after the 2008 presidential election that the department shouldn’t trust the wait times that its facilities were reporting.

“This is not only a data integrity issue in which [Veterans Health Administration] reports unreliable performance data; it affects quality of care by delaying — and potentially denying — deserving veterans timely care,” the officials wrote.

 
Six years ago!
 
So whatever feigned indignation and false promises he’s peddling today, it’s all smoke and mirrors. If the president were serious wouldn’t he have addresssed this issue when he first took office? And in the face of these new allegations, wouldn’t he be encouraging anyone with evidence of healthcare abuses and cover-ups to come forward so we can get to the bottom of this debacle and solve the problems? Instead, it appears that just the opposite is happening… intimidation ~ More Whistleblowers Detail VA Abuses, Suffer Retaliation ~

The allegations of wait times, delayed care for veterans and cooked books began in Phoenix, but new revelations by two more Veterans Affairs whistleblowers in two different states suggest the VA problems are endemic.
 
“What really bothered me was that this delay was a direct result of this extremely low sense of caring for the patient,” said Dr. Jose Mathews, the chief psychiatrist for the VA Medical Center in St. Louis starting in Nov 2012 […]
 
According to Mathews, he noticed that the doctors he oversaw who were responsible for seeing veterans with post-traumatic stress and other acute mental health issues were working just a few hours a day. They were seeing about half the patients they could, Mathews alleged in a federal whistleblower complaint filed last year. Meanwhile, there were mounting suicides among veterans being treated at his facility — and officially, the St. Louis VA was reporting to its headquarters in Washington that its productivity was among the highest in the nation.
 
“They all got bonuses — that’s the sad part. Because in reality we were not really doing a good job, but it shows up on paper as if we are,” Mathews told Fox News.
 
When Mathews complained, he was removed from his job, assigned to an isolated office to oversee pensions and compensation. He was told not to contact the other doctors or patients.
 
“I think they have some form of moral blindness or something. They’re not able to see that this is not right, what they’re doing is not right,” said Mathews, a soft-spoken psychiatrist who says the veterans would have to wait a month or more for mental health treatment.

 
In West Virginia, another doctor claims patients on VA waiting list committed suicide (Fox News – with video). And she was ignored as well ~

(Dr. Margaret Moxness, who) was employed at the Huntington VA Medical Center in Charleston, W.Va., from 2008 to 2010, told “Fox & Friends” on Monday that she was told to delay treatment even after she told supervisors (patients) needed immediate care. She said at least two patients committed suicide while waiting for treatment between appointments(!)
 
Moxness said when she complained to her supervisors that it was harmful to partially treat patients, they stopped talking to her.
 
“I was functionally silenced,” she said.

 
So whatever line the O’ministration is tossing out these days, just know this: they don’t care, they never did, and nothing concrete will be done to improve the decidedly UNhealthy situation at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

 
Judge Jeanine sums up this outrage nicely – loud and clear: VA Deaths Are Criminally Negligent HOMICIDE ~
 

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Related:
Never mind, Obama really cares about our vets. Remember this (from 2009)? Obama VA: Let’s charge vets for care on service-related injuries
 
VA scandal exposes danger of government-run health care ~ Fox News must have read my post ~ VA Healthcare Scandal: Preview of Coming Attractions