Obama knew about VA issues in 2008

[werepossum]

As with werepossum, I believe the President can respond to the VA's failings in an effective way. One that would be commendable if he actually accomplishes the task of cleaning it up.

It is disgraceful that he campaigned against VA failures and then failed to do anything about it, but the President can come out on top of this and prevail in the end. All he has to do is the right thing, and history would remember him as the one who made government work.

Hopefully this will be a catalyst to open up the VA. My coworker, a Desert Storm combat veteran, took over two years to get a freakin' pair of glasses. It's almost a hundred miles each way and not uncommonly, the appointment gets cancelled after driving there and waiting for hours. There is absolutely no excuse for that. I very much agree with Miller's proposed bill that if the wait is longer than 30 days the VA MUST pay for civilian medical care. We would not put up with this from private sector health insurance companies for Joe Sixpack, why the hell do we put up with it for veterans? Let the VA utilize local health care providers for routine care and thereby free up VA health care providers to quickly provide care where combat-specific or military-specific expertise is needed.

The Washington Post ran an article a few weeks back about the former head of GSA, Martha Johnson, who was forced to resign following the Las Vegas convention scandal. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...tha-johnsons-fast-fall-from-power-at-the-gsa/) The article portrayed her resignation as classic scapegoating, the firing of someone simply to see someone, anyone, get fired for a gov't SNAFU. The sad part was, she could've tried to cover up the scandal when it first came to light, but she really did want to update and modernize the agency and make it more accountable, so she ordered an investigation and allowed all the facts to come to light. For trying to make gov't more efficient and accountable, she was forced to resign. When Johnson was called before Congress to testify regarding this scandal, Rep. James Lankford (R-Okla.) noted: “You resigned, though your office is the office that actually started this investigation. This would not have come to light unless your office would’ve started it. But as the leader at the top, you resigned,” he said. “And people that were directly there making the decisions, signing onto the warrants, going through these fraudulent contracts, they’re still there.”

Classic Washington. I hope the people calling for Shinseki to resign make sure he's actually culpable for sort of maleficence before they put his head on a pike.

Shinseki should learn from Johnson's mistakes. When malfeasance comes to light, it's not enough to "investigate" and promise not to do it anymore. Ultimately, if Shinseki wants to keep his job and his reputation he needs to move aggressively to arrests and prosecutions.

 

[Mursilis]

Hopefully this will be a catalyst to open up the VA. My coworker, a Desert Storm combat veteran, took over two years to get a freakin' pair of glasses. It's almost a hundred miles each way and not uncommonly, the appointment gets cancelled after driving there and waiting for hours. There is absolutely no excuse for that. I very much agree with Miller's proposed bill that if the wait is longer than 30 days the VA MUST pay for civilian medical care. We would not put up with this from private sector health insurance companies for Joe Sixpack, why the hell do we put up with it for veterans? Let the VA utilize local health care providers for routine care and thereby free up VA health care providers to quickly provide care where combat-specific or military-specific expertise is needed.

The VA already does contract-out some healthcare services, but demand is still only going to increase. Veterans, like the rest of American, are only getting older and less healthy. The fact that so many veterans turn to VA for healthcare, even for problems completely unrelated to service, suggests VA is at least doing something right.

 

[unokitty]

The “...President... has not done what we needed to do for our veterans,” ... “We haven’t funded the VA. We have so many coming home who are injured and not being taken care of. I think it is the highest obligation of the President, who is also our commander in chief, to take care of those who have served our nation.”...

Hillary Clinton 2008

In 2008, Hillary was right.

In 2014, we have a different president but the VA hasn't changed. And Hillary is still right.

Uno

 

[Bowfinger]

Breaking news - Shinseki has resigned and Obama accepted it. Multiple VA managers are being fired. Obama is giving a press conference now.

 

[Mursilis]

Breaking news - Shinseki has resigned and Obama accepted it. Multiple VA managers are being fired. Obama is giving a press conference now.

Wow. Just saw that. I'm glad to see managers were fired, but I'm sad to see Shinseki go. I really think he was trying to improve things at VA.

 

[TerryMathews]

My point being, that's it's not "the advantage of decoupling payment from service. Your insurance company can't make you wait 115 days for an appointment" because it happens in the private insurance industry as well.

His post was pointless and pure ideological bullshit and I called him on it. Now he's mad that I responded to his irrelevant post. Lol

Explain how your insurance company can keep you from seeing your doctor for 115 days.

I'm waiting

 

[boomerang]

Explain how your insurance company can keep you from seeing your doctor for 115 days.

I'm waiting

I want more than an explanation, I want stats.

 

[TerryMathews]

I want more than an explanation, I want stats.

Its so simple, I don't know why we are fighting about this.

Your insurance company pays (a portion of) the bill. Your doctor doesn't generate a bill until after your visit. QED it is impossible for an insurance company to keep you from seeing your doctor. And by doctor I mean primary care physician which is the equivalent situation to what these 1700 vets went through.

 

[Jaskalas]

Breaking news - Shinseki has resigned and Obama accepted it. Multiple VA managers are being fired. Obama is giving a press conference now.

Media has brought it to his attention, he is responding in a seemingly appropriate way. Now we just have to wait and see if conditions improve under new management.

In before he asks for more money...

 

[boomerang]

Its so simple, I don't know why we are fighting about this.

Your insurance company pays (a portion of) the bill. Your doctor doesn't generate a bill until after your visit. QED it is impossible for an insurance company to keep you from seeing your doctor. And by doctor I mean primary care physician which is the equivalent situation to what these 1700 vets went through.

It's just the typical desperate posturing of progz. Throw shit out to perhaps create doubt while hoping you don't get called out to back it up. It's just a derivation of "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."

 

[ivwshane]

Explain how your insurance company can keep you from seeing your doctor for 115 days.

I'm waiting

If your insurance denies your claim for a procedure does your doctor do the procedure? No. The denial causes a delay until you get it approved, sometimes it gets approved and sometimes it doesn't and sometimes you die while waiting.

Feel free to research the footnotes yourself, feel free to research the tactics of insurance companies yourself because only your own research has any chance of penatrating your thick skull.

http://www.justice.org/cps/rde/xbcr/justice/InsuranceTactics.pdf

For christs sakes man get the fuck out of your bubble!

 

[ivwshane]

Its so simple, I don't know why we are fighting about this.

Your insurance company pays (a portion of) the bill. Your doctor doesn't generate a bill until after your visit. QED it is impossible for an insurance company to keep you from seeing your doctor. And by doctor I mean primary care physician which is the equivalent situation to what these 1700 vets went through.

Lol! Terrymarhews moving the goal posts?!! No way!


/s

 

[TerryMathews]

Lol! Terrymarhews moving the goal posts?!! No way!


/s

Never moved the goalpost. Do you need me to quote forward the whole exchange so you're not confused?

My assertion was that your insurance cannot create these 115 day delays to see a primary care physician like the VA did.

Aside from hurling insults, none of you refuted that point. I am assuming it is because you cannot.

 

[TerryMathews]

If your insurance denies your claim for a procedure does your doctor do the procedure? No. The denial causes a delay until you get it approved, sometimes it gets approved and sometimes it doesn't and sometimes you die while waiting.

We aren't talking about chemotherapy. We are talking about an office visit to a primary care physician. That is what the Phoenix VA denied to these vets and its literally impossible for your insurance company to do so.

You are correct, the insurance industry preauthorizes any number of surgical or chemically-based treatment procedures and can delay those for days to years. I am not aware of one single insurance that preauthorizes office visits, and I've had all the major carriers over the years. If you know of one, link it and I will concede the point. Until then, I stand behind my assertion. It's the industry standard, and everyone that has ever had health insurance knows how it works.

 

[ivwshane]

Never moved the goalpost. Do you need me to quote forward the whole exchange so you're not confused?

My assertion was that your insurance cannot create these 115 day delays to see a primary care physician like the VA did.

Aside from hurling insults, none of you refuted that point. I am assuming it is because you cannot.

Lol! The words "primary care physician" don't appear in any of your quotes or the people responding to you.

(Hint: your original response to uno's post was about death panels. There is no difference between a "death panel" caused by not seeing your PCP or a "death panel" caused by insurance denying claims, the results are the same, people died and suffered as a result. Turning this discussion into an ideological debate instead of focusing on the issues is disgusting!

You may have implied that but that is not what you said. Feel free to admit you were wrong and I'll concede to your now clarified point.

 

[TerryMathews]

Lol! The words "primary care physician" don't appear in any of your quotes or the people responding to you.

(Hint: your original response to uno's post was about death panels. There is no difference between a "death panel" caused by not seeing your PCP or a "death panel" caused by insurance denying claims, the results are the same, people died and suffered as a result. Turning this discussion into an ideological debate instead of focusing on the issues is disgusting!

You may have implied that but that is not what you said. Feel free to admit you were wrong and I'll concede to your now clarified point.

I will not concede, for this specific reason:

What were the 1700 vets kept from scheduling in Phoenix?

Your failing is that you didn't understand the situation we were discussing. You are correct, nowhere did I point out that the 1700 vets identified by the IG in Phoenix were kept from making primary care appointments .

So, I suppose I did make a mistake: I assumed you were familiar with the topic of discussion.

The bottom line was it was a snarky comment, and while based in reality was not intended to be a literal topic of discussion. Please remove the stick from your ass now.

And, I hope to God you don't have VA health care: I can't deal with you acting like this for 115 days. ;-)

ETA to reinforce my point:

I think it's also important to note that these employees who decided to deny service to 1700+ vets do not in any way constitute a death panel... :whistle:

 

[ivwshane]

Lol! Bitch bitches out! News at 11!

As I pointed out to and you conveniently ignored, was that a "death panel", or an entity that arbitrarily causes suffering and even death, is a "death panel" regardless if access was denied at the PCP level or after PCP access. The fact that you continue with your nonsense shows how utterly fucking retarded you are!

Is one "death panel" better than the other? The person who responded to your "snarky" comment didn't think so nor do I and I suspect that if you weren't so heavily invested in supporting your "snarky" comment you would agree.

I'll give you another chance to correct your disgusting behavior, delete your original post and I'll delete mine.

Anything less will only highlight your hackery on this topic.

 

[werepossum]

The VA already does contract-out some healthcare services, but demand is still only going to increase. Veterans, like the rest of American, are only getting older and less healthy. The fact that so many veterans turn to VA for healthcare, even for problems completely unrelated to service, suggests VA is at least doing something right.

Or that it's hard to beat free, even when it's inconvenient.

Wow. Just saw that. I'm glad to see managers were fired, but I'm sad to see Shinseki go. I really think he was trying to improve things at VA.

I don't doubt that he was trying to improve things at VA, but someone had to fall on his sword and Shinseki was the one making false reports to the President. Gibson starts with something Shinseki lacked - a widespread acknowledgement that the VA is rotten. Hopefully Gibson has been in trace long enough to already know which asses to start kicking ass and where to look for the next batch of foot-deficient posteriors once he's done with those. Gibson can do things now that had Shinseki done earlier would have caused a great hue and cry. And while Gibson is not a long time combat soldier as is Shinseki, his private sector experience is as a banking exec, not a director. That's a much more hands-on position than is a directorship, plus one probably gets a lot more experience with people attempting to lie as a banker than as a military officer.

With Gibson's limited military experience I'm guessing he probably won't be nominated for the top spot, but that might be just as well. Means he can dig as aggressively as he likes without worrying overmuch about whom he pisses off.

 

[werepossum]

I found this article pretty profound. The VA has known about this, and has actually been working on it, since 2005. Instead of getting better, it's been getting worse. http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/05/30/how-the-va-developed-its-culture-of-coverups/

It's easy to see how Shinseki, an honorable military man, could miss this: It's not in the best interests of any of his 200,000 employees to tell him. The Secretary and indeed, his deputies are transient figures whose best interests are antithetical to those of the bureaucracy. And as an honorable military man, Shinseki would naturally believe that the bureaucracy is there to serve veterans. It is not; the bureaucracy is there to serve the bureaucracy. It is in the nature of the bureaucracy that its own existence eventually (usually quickly) becomes more important than the reason for its creation.

From one of the comments:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." – Upton Sinclair (1876-1968)

"The government are very keen on amassing statistics--they collect them, add them, raise them to the n’th power, take the cube root, and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is that every one of those figures comes in the first place from the chowty dar [village watchman] who just puts down what he damn pleases." -- Josiah Stamp (1880-1941)

Those two things are fairly profound in this context. Before Clinton, the VA bureaucracy was very bad. Under Kliver, it grew leaner and more responsive, but the same leaning out left it subject to a different kind of abuse. Obama inherited a corrupt VA and watched it get worse not because of Shinseki, but because that's what bureaucracies do. Hopefully Gibson or another can make the bureaucracy get better AND figure out how to establish vital feedback loops independent of the bureaucracy itself.

I don't know how to do that, but prosecuting the bosses who directed underlings to do this has to be a damned good start. Apparently that would mean pretty much all new bosses, but hey, lots of good people looking for jobs now.

 

[Fern]

Obama was warned in 2008 about the VA's purposefully inaccurate data.

The simple fact is no one, he or Shinseki, did anything about it. There were also numerous reports after 2008. Still no one did anything about it until the media recently blew it up.

There are simply no excuses and I pity no one who is taking grief about it.

If you're a President and you inherit a mess your job is to fix it. Period. If you're put in charge of an agency and it's a mess, you're job is to fix it.

All this about "well, it was mess since (insert past date)" and "nobody knew" is nothing but BS.

Does anyone else expect nothing to really change in the long run?

Fern

 

[TerryMathews]

Lol! Bitch bitches out! News at 11!

Who, you?

As I pointed out to and you conveniently ignored, was that a "death panel", or an entity that arbitrarily causes suffering and even death, is a "death panel" regardless if access was denied at the PCP level or after PCP access. The fact that you continue with your nonsense shows how utterly fucking retarded you are!

Which has what relevance in this discussion? You seem to be laboring under the assumption that I stated or believe that private insurance companies don't have "death panels". Which is a complete misrepresentation of both the content and intent of my posts.

I truly don't know what you're looking for here. Yes, insurance companies fuck with people's coverages especially when they are sick. They reclassify accepted treatments as experimental so they don't have to pay for them. They delay approvals of treatment plans for the sick hoping they die first. They are generally shitty scum sucking bottom feeders.

None of this changes the fact the one thing they can't do is what the VA did in this situation-keep you from seeing your primary care physician.

Is one "death panel" better than the other? The person who responded to your "snarky" comment didn't think so nor do I and I suspect that if you weren't so heavily invested in supporting your "snarky" comment you would agree.

Never said one was better than the other, or implied it. If you think I did, link it and we'll discuss it. Right now you're so wound up with Obama-fervor that I doubt you're seeing straight.

I'll give you another chance to correct your disgusting behavior, delete your original post and I'll delete mine.

Anything less will only highlight your hackery on this topic.

I don't know who you think you are or why you think I care what you have to say. Your responses in this thread have been on the level of Dari and DominionSeraph. You claiming I'm irrational is practically a badge of honor; its like being executed by the Nazis for treason.

 

[ivwshane]

Who, you?



Which has what relevance in this discussion? You seem to be laboring under the assumption that I stated or believe that private insurance companies don't have "death panels". Which is a complete misrepresentation of both the content and intent of my posts.

I truly don't know what you're looking for here. Yes, insurance companies fuck with people's coverages especially when they are sick. They reclassify accepted treatments as experimental so they don't have to pay for them. They delay approvals of treatment plans for the sick hoping they die first. They are generally shitty scum sucking bottom feeders.

None of this changes the fact the one thing they can't do is what the VA did in this situation-keep you from seeing your primary care physician.



Never said one was better than the other, or implied it. If you think I did, link it and we'll discuss it. Right now you're so wound up with Obama-fervor that I doubt you're seeing straight.



I don't know who you think you are or why you think I care what you have to say. Your responses in this thread have been on the level of Dari and DominionSeraph. You claiming I'm irrational is practically a badge of honor; its like being executed by the Nazis for treason.

I figured you'd bitch out, it's your MO.

Lol!

 

[TerryMathews]

I figured you'd bitch out, it's your MO.

Lol!

What, did someone get you an unabridged dictionary for Christmas?

I'm still waiting for you to make a post with some content in it instead of your flailing insults. It is amusing though, you're like an interactive version of the PC game Kingpin.

 

[Zorkorist]

If people ask you why Capitalism works, this is what you tell them. People get treated (so other people can make money.)

As soon as Government is involved, it is all fucked up.

-John

 

[Zorkorist]

Otherwise you at are the mercy of that guy in Lawrence of Arabia, sniffing up and down your body.

-John