Time to Boot Eric Shinseki from the Veterans Administration — It Is Way too Late for Him to Say that He Did Not Know about VA Appointment Backlogs and Cover Ups

19 May 2014

A note about my negative tone

Virtually nothing pisses me off as much as people, who take advantage of (or neglect) our troops and military veterans.

Mr. Secretary — do you take us for nitwits?

From Politico:

Fighting for his political life, Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki declared on Thursday he’s “mad as hell” over allegations at the center of an unfolding scandal related to treatment delays at veterans hospitals.

“If these allegations are true, they‘re completely unacceptable to me, to veterans,” Shinseki told the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee amid an effort to oust him over the issue.

“I’m committed to take all actions necessary to identify exactly what the issues are, to fix them and to strengthen veterans’ trust in VA health care,” he said. “If any allegations are substantiated by the inspector general, we will act.”

Eric Shinseki’s surprise might be fine, if the appointment backlog allegations and the evidence for them were new

But they came to light years ago, as people who follow our military and veterans will remember.

Consequently, General Shinseki (retired) is either grossly incompetent or pretending outrage over something that he knew about, but did nothing effective to correct:

Internal memos show the VA has been playing whack a mole for at least six years with employees who use dozens of different scheduling tricks to hide substantial delays in health care for America’s veterans. And whenever the VA tries to stop its staffers from “gaming the system,” the staffers come up with new techniques.

Whistleblowers around the country are now accusing the VA of hiding a backlog in patient care with bookkeeping tricks, and a former doctor at a VA facility in Arizona says the delays may have contributed to the deaths of 40 patients.

In an April 26, 2010 memo, the VA’s deputy undersecretary for health administrative operations, William Schoenhard said, “It has come to my attention that in order to improve scores on assorted access measures, certain facilities have adopted use of inappropriate scheduling practices sometimes referred to as ‘gaming strategies.’ … This is not patient centered care.”

Schoenhard then listed two dozen different tactics identified in a 2008 study that facilities around the country were using to cut down on the officially recorded time that patients had to wait for care.

The techniques included pretending that appointments cancelled by the clinic were cancelled by the patient, and refusing to schedule appointments for patients when there was no appointment available within 30 days. Patients were told to wait a month and then call back.

Two of the techniques described in the memo closely resemble the methods described by the whistleblowers who have gone public recently with claims that VA facilities have disguised actual patient waiting time.

Notice that the emphasis in the above two articles appears to be directed at nastily wily employees — rather than at the VA command structure and its miserable supervisory performance

Supervisors exist to supervise, and rather obviously the Veterans Administration’s do not.

It is relatively easy to get rid of employees, even in government work, who violate regulations and orders. Document the screw-ups, set down future expectations in writing, and when the recalcitrants fail to correct their behavior, fire them.

All that is required is thorough documentation, attentive supervision, a willingness to confront problems, and the will to follow through with defending termination actions in court.

This is not especially difficult. I know because I’ve done it myself. Effective command just requires that the top boss enforce discipline all the way down the supervisory chain and boot everyone, who does not buy into the organization’s mission and performance standards.

Secretary Shinseki has, one can infer, not done this effectively. And he is now apparently pretending that the problem of appointment delays and employee gaming are all new to him.

It is Shinseki’s avoidance of responsibility that especially gets to me. If we in the public knew about veterans’ frustration with appointment and treatment backlogs years ago, how could the Secretary of Veterans Affairs not?

The moral? — Enough already

General/Secretary Eric Shinseki should be out looking for work. As well as apologizing to the Commander in Chief for making veterans suffer and the presidency look (deservedly) bad.

PeteFree.com

Time to Boot Eric Shinseki from the Veterans Administration — It Is Way too Late for Him to Say that He Did Not Know about VA Appointment Backlogs and Cover Ups