In yet another example of her accuracy-challenged policy analysis, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., waxed poetic while endorsing the quality of healthcare administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs, saying, “The VA does know what it’s doing,” and, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Sadly, President Trump agreed with Ocasio-Cortez, tweeting: “Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is correct, the VA is not broken, it is doing great.”
To the perennial defenders of the VA’s bureaucracy, the scandal which began at one of its Phoenix facilities in 2014 was a minor, isolated incident that did not represent the whole department. Those protestations rang hollow in the face of similar scandals in state after state.
In Texas, “seven vets or their families were sent disclosures about adverse events and serious injuries suffered because of delayed care.” In South Carolina, “veterans waiting months for simple gastrointestinal procedures — such as a colonoscopy or endoscopy — have been dying because their cancers aren’t caught in time.” In Georgia, “three veterans died as a result of delayed care. Internal documents at that facility showed a waiting list of 4,500 patients.” A 2014 internal VA audit of 731 VA facilities nationwide found, “57,436 newly enrolled veterans facing a minimum 90-day wait for medical care; 63,869 veterans who enrolled over the past decade requesting an appointment that never happened.”
The scandal continued into 2016 when USA Today released internal VA Office of Inspector General reviews showing how VA employees in 19 states and Puerto Rico routinely “zeroed out” veteran wait times and in seven states the supervisors themselves instructed schedulers to fabricate wait times; the Government Accountability Office condemned the VA’s “piecemeal approach” to reform; and two other inspector general reports found more than 200 manipulated wait times in Houston-area VA facilities and, “VA patients in Iowa and South Dakota were assigned to primary care ‘ghost panels,’ or doctors who no longer worked at their hospitals.”
Scandalous reports continued into the Trump administration. A 2018 inspector general report condemned “failed leadership at multiple levels within VA.” The report found at least $92 million in overpriced medical supplies, more than 10,000 pending appointments for prosthetics, and a “lack of consistently clean storage areas for medical supplies and equipment.” The report blamed the department’s “culture of complacency” for allowing gross negligence at D.C.’s VA hospital that, in some cases, resulted in “patients receiv[ing] unnecessary anesthesia when scheduled procedures were delayed to track down or borrow items.” The report’s conclusion charged the department with an “unwillingness or inability of leaders to take responsibility for the effectiveness of their programs and operations.” And on April 11, 2019, the American Legion even chided the VA for failing to “prevent future communication breakdowns between home-care social workers and VA medical centers.”
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the VA scandal was not isolated, nor minor, nor limited. It was nationwide and systemic and still plagues the department and the millions of heroic servicemen and women who rely on its care.
The scandal is now on its second president and its fourth secretary, but prominent Democrats continue to defend the department.
Presidential contender Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., led the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee from 2013 to 15, when the scandal burst into the public consciousness. Sanders was one of the first scandal-deniers, blaming it on the “Koch brothers and others — who want to radically change the nature of society, and either make major cuts in all of these institutions, or maybe do away with them entirely.” The New York Times even rebuked Sanders, stating, “his deep-seated faith in the fundamental goodness of government blinded him, at least at first, to a dangerous breakdown in the one corner of it he was supposed to police.” That bureaucratic blindness has clearly afflicted Ocasio-Cortez as well.
Some positive steps have been taken recently. In 2018, President Trump signed the VA Mission Act, which received overwhelming bipartisan support, orders a review of VA facilities nationwide with the goal of identifying and trimming old or underperforming hospitals. The administration has also taken administrative action to allow veterans to access private hospital care if they live too far from a VA facility or face an excessive wait time. These are constructive steps that can help mitigate the sting from the ongoing scandal. The need for these measures also flies in the face of Ocasio-Cortez’s contention that the VA is working just fine as it is. She and all members of Congress should welcome veteran choice instead of blindly opposing it on purely ideological grounds.
In the end, the first step in any challenge is admitting it exists and accurately diagnosing the problem. Unfortunately, there are still far too many in Washington that deny the VA scandal’s intensity or try to obscure its pervasiveness. Until these efforts end, pulling the VA out of perpetual scandal will be an uphill climb.
Curtis Kalin (@CurtisKalin) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is communications director for Citizens Against Government Waste.
