Thanks to a whistleblower, the Daily Beast has a great article exposing the underlying problems at the VA in Texas, problems that go much deeper than just keeping secret lists for the sake of looking good. This whistleblower describes the Texas VA as though it were being run as an organized crime syndicate. I would add that the practices there bring new meaning to the term ‘culture of corruption’.
The article is very long, but this first part should summarize it pretty well:
DAILY BEAST – Emails and VA memos obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast provide what is among the most comprehensive accounts yet of how high-level VA hospital employees conspired to game the system. It shows not only how they manipulated hospital wait lists but why—to cover up the weeks and months veterans spent waiting for needed medical care. If those lag times had been revealed, it would have threatened the executives’ bonus pay.
What’s worse, the documents show the wrongdoing going unpunished for years, even after it was repeatedly reported to local and national VA authorities. That indicates a new troubling angle to the VA scandal: that the much touted investigations may be incapable of finding violations that are hiding in plain sight.
“For lack of a better term, you’ve got an organized crime syndicate,” a whistleblower who works in the Texas VA told The Daily Beast. “People up on top are suddenly afraid they may actually be prosecuted and they’re pressuring the little guys down below to cover it all up.”
“I see it in the executives’ eyes,” the whistleblower added. “They are worried.”
…
But, despite the political uproar and the growing investigations, the root causes of the VA crisis have remained murky. New documents and whistleblower testimony obtained by The Daily Beast shed light on exactly how fraud is being perpetrated in the VA and its underlying causes.
There’s enormous pressure to report favorable wait times for VA patients, the Texas whistleblower explained, even if those wait times are completely false.
“If [VA] directors report low numbers, they’re the outlier. They won’t stay a director very long and they certainly won’t get promoted. No one is getting rewarded for honesty. They pretty much have to lie, if they don’t they won’t go anywhere,” the whistleblower added. Weighted more heavily than other performance measures, the wait time numbers alone “count for 50% of the executive career field bonus, which is a pretty powerful motivator.”
Though VA hospitals may be struggling with increasing patient loads and inadequate resources—including too few medical providers—they are punished for acknowledging those problems. The VA’s current system appears to reward executives’ accounting tricks that mask deep structural issues and impede real solutions.
The whistleblower—who will alternately be called “the clinician,” referring to the job they have held with the Texas VA for almost a decade—asked to remain anonymous due to fear of losing their job or being otherwise punished for speaking out.
