A former physician at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital outside Chicago says she faced intense retaliation after alerting VA management to dangerous delays in patient care.
Dr. Lisa Nee, who worked as a cardiologist at the troubled Edward Hines Jr. VA Hospital in Illinois until 2013, shares a similar story with hundreds of other VA whistleblowers who have seen their careers at the agency crumble after trying to report wrongdoing to management.
But after leaving the VA in frustration, Nee filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the hospital’s financial records and made a startling discovery: everyone in her department, including doctors who had allegedly committed billing fraud and abused patients, had received bonuses except for her.
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That included physicians who, according to Nee, performed unnecessary bypass surgeries on veterans because their bonuses were tied to “productivity” numbers that could be boosted by scheduling extra procedures.
“Everybody at Hines is still there who committed these acts,” Nee told the Washington Examiner. “Almost every single person has received a promotion.”
Few VA officials who were involved in a nationwide cover-up of long wait times have ever faced punishment for their actions. In fact, just three were ever fired from their positions, and at least two are still on paid leave from the agency.
Whistleblowers, on the other hand, have been stripped of their responsibilities and subjected to invasive internal investigations simply for reporting such cover-ups.
That was the case with Nee, who first sounded the alarm in Feb. 2011 after discovering banker’s boxes full of unread echocardiograms that had collected dust for up to year. Some of the veterans whose tests were in the boxes had already died or suffered complications while waiting to learn the results of their echocardiograms.
When Nee informed her superiors about the boxes, she was told that they already knew and were “trying to work on it.”
“That really was the end of my career,” Nee said.
The cardiologist said she was then moved into a leaky office filled with asbestos, had her computer confiscated and was prevented from performing the procedures she was trained to do.
The VA’s watchdog offered little help after Nee lodged a formal complaint with the inspector general’s supposedly anonymous tip line.
Within 24 hours, her bosses were aware that she had gone to the inspector general and were threatening to sue her for breaching patient confidentiality if she shared documents with investigators.
Later, when the inspector general did open an investigation into Hines at the behest of Rep. Tammy Duckworth and Sen. Richard Durbin, investigators never even interviewed Nee.
Many other whistleblowers have said the VA’s inspector general contributes to a culture of retaliation within the agency by leaking anonymous tips to the very people accused of wrongdoing.
The resulting inspector general report found the Hines VA hospital did indeed perform at least nine heart surgeries that “may have been inappropriate,” but did not recommend any punishments because none of the veterans died as a result. They were, however, subjected to unnecessary risk by undergoing bypasses they might not have needed.
Critics blasted the report, released in April of last year, for whitewashing problems at the Hines VA facility.
At the request of the Office of Special Counsel, which handles cases like Nee’s for agencies across the federal government, medical inspectors have opened a new investigation of patient care at Hines. That probe is still ongoing.
The Office of Special Counsel has long questioned the VA’s severe treatment of whistleblowers, noting in a September letter that the agency “has attempted to fire or suspend whistleblowers for minor indiscretions and, often, for activity directly related to the employee’s whistleblowing.”
Nee discovered her entire department had received performance bonuses just as the VA was coming under fire for attempting to blame its failures on a lack of resources while doling out bonuses.
A review of the financial records reveals some in the cardiology department received “retention allowances” as large as $28,000. Officials netted “incentive awards” and “performance awards” that ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.
The VA came under renewed scrutiny Wednesday following a report that revealed the agency had handed out more than $142 million in performance bonuses last year, when the wait-time scandal was first revealed to the public.
Nee said would-be whistleblowers at Hines decline to come forward after seeing officials rewarded for misdeeds such as billing fraud and ignoring healthcare delays.
“There’s hundreds of physicians that have gone to jail for the exact same type of fraud, and yet no one will touch them at the VA,” she said.
But Nee questioned why whistleblowers like herself have experienced internal retribution for exposing the kind of abuse the VA publicly decries.
“We’re not the NSA. We didn’t leak military secrets,” she said. “We’re just people that worked at outside facilities, and now worked at Hines, and the first thing we see is harm.”
The VA did not respond to a request for comment.
