The “few bad apples” theory is as gone as Jay Carney and Eric Shinseki. 64 percent is not a bad few apples. 13 percent is not a few bad apples. This is systemwide. Appointments’ wait times were manipulated at more than 60 percent of the Department of Veterans Affairs health facilities investigated as part of a new internal audit. The audit, issued as VA Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned Friday, found that 64 percent of the 216 VA facilities reviewed had at least one instance where a veterans’ desired appointment date had been changed. The review found 13 percent of schedulers had received specific instructions to misrepresent wait times. Is the VA badly broken? It’s as badly broken as the rest of government. No one wants to look too closely at what happens when mandates by “bold new reformers” get tossed at an old bureaucracy. It’s a familiar pattern made worse by the fact that despite Obama’s recent full court press of military photo ops touched off in response to the scandal, this was an issue that his administration didn’t care about. Widespread fraud elsewhere gets commented on when it hurts policy goals. Here no policy goals were being hurt. If anything, Obama was big on cutting military health care. VA problems are bad publicity, but unlike ObamaCare, they don’t harm policy goals. The odds are good that the solution will involve more mandates leading to more fraud and more abuses. And the cycle will continue and as long as the PR problem is fixed, Obama won’t care.
Posted on: Sun, 01 Jun 2014 17:27:18 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015