If the records showed the veterans had really been waiting 17 or 35 or 62 or 107 days instead of 14, what would have been the outcomes?
The VA’s ability to provide appointments is dependent on the number of doctors (nurses, X-ray techs, etc.) and the availability of facilities, neither of which depend on the length of the waiting lists. The VA operates within a budgeted amount; if the amount isn’t sufficient, the only alternative is to go back to Congress and ask for more money. That process won’t happen within a few days or weeks; it may well end up taking several years to get another radiologist or oncologist or whatever budgeted, assigned to a facility, hired, and so forth. The people on the waiting lists when the process started spent exactly as long on that list whether it was secret or not.
While the number of veterans is declining as the WWII/Korea generation dies off, the number utilizing the VA is increasing dramatically. Outpatient visits, e.g., went from 46.5 million in 2002 to 83.6 million in 2012. Budgets are increasing, too, but not by enough to let them get ahead of the curve.
The American heroes exterminated by VA Death Panels are victims of sloth, malice and, in some cases most probably secret experimentation. Sometimes it’s just a VA nurse too comfortable suckling at the taxpayer’s teat who is too lazy to get a guy an aspirin, but surely some of the deaths are politically targeted. And it may be that some of the deaths are due to secret government experiments similar to those of Dr. Christian Szell during the 1940’s.
Deaths in the World’s Greatest Health System, America’s freely competitive systems, on the other hand, are tributes to Free Market Virtues. If those dead could speak, they’d praise their deaths, and show pride at being sacrificed on the altar of entrepreneurial efficacy so that real Americans too proud to suckle their healthcare from the Marxist teat, could have lower premiums. Each of those deaths is like a joyous poem.
That’s why I said “might.” That’s all anyone can say now. Absent a time machine, we have no way of knowing what would have happened had they not been on a wait list. The only thing we know is that the records were falsified, the red flag list specifically designed to identify if anyone was not getting prompt treatment, so any action that might have occurred in reaction, didn’t. We’ll never know for sure who would have lived. Perhaps some individual instances where the facts make it highly likely that quicker treatment would have saved the day will come out, but no one will know for certain even then.
Of course, if the defense of the VHA’s falsification of records, obscuring the existence of waiting patients who then died during the wait, relies on some form of, “Well, who knows, maybe they would have died anyway”–well, that’s pretty weak.
The rest of your post was you stating your opinion. Was I supposed to care about it ? What answer were you expecting for your absence of a question ? I’m serious, were you actually expecting any response to your “well I think you said that”, itself a response to “that’s not what I said” ?
Your entire exchange was an excuse for the people who falsified the records, placed in a barely coherent context of what the root cause was. Sorry, you wrote it, try owning it.
Still not seeing a question, or anything I’m supposed to “answer for”. Still seeing nothing but your opinion on what I wrote. So I’ll ask again : what response are you expecting for that dazzling brilliance of yours, humble sir ?
“Yes, Stratocaster, I can see now that you’re right, I did indeed excuse ‘fuck all.’ Thanks for the enlightenment. I’ll try not be so inconsistent in the future.” Then bow your head and genuflect.
I don’t have time to read the thread now, so I apologize for that. When I am not running off to work I shall. But I did want to point this out:
[QUOTE=Sen. Bernie Sanders]
The bottom line here, I would hope that as a country, is that we fully understand the cost of war. And Andrea let me tell you, I think many people do not. We’re not just talking about the thousands of people who died in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’re talking about 200,000 men and women who came home with PTSD and TBI. We’re talking about people who came home without legs, without arms, without hearing, and without eyesight, and if this country stands for anything, what we have got to say is that we are going to provide adequate funding to make sure that every person who is entitled to those healthcare services gets the best healthcare they can and they get it in a timely manner.
[/QUOTE]
The article at Politics USA goes on to mention
I realize that it’s easy for Democrats to point out that when Republicans start screaming scandal that either the Republican administration(s) prior had the same issues and/or their own policies or stance on bills are responsible for the problems.
But in this case, nobody other than Sanders is mentioning the obvious: We just had hundreds of thousands of new veterans of foreign wars made in the past decade-plus. The system needs to be made to account for that. And using supposed fiscal responsibility is the reason Republicans in office are contributing towards not fixing this problem.
So it’s especially disingenuous for them to be making this a partisan issue.
Does anyone know how the secret waiting lists were kept secret? Presumably the veterans who were told the next available appointment is in 6 months knew that the waits were more than 14 days, whatever the stated policy. I’m a little confused how that works.
On the other hand World War II and Korean Conflict vets have been dying off rapidly in the past decade–and there were a great deal more veterans who came home from these conflicts.
Has anyone done a quick check to see if the 40 veterans who died did so of the thing they were waiting to be seen for? Because if someone dies of a heart attack before the expiration of their three month wait to get their rash seen by a dermatologist, I’m a little less outraged than if they died of a heart attack before they could get their chest pains evaluated by a cardiologist.
Once it becomes part of the process, it’s just part of the process. Who does it have to be kept secret from? You’re a veteran and you get told when your appointment is going to be. Do you know that there’s a “stated policy” that you should be seen in 14 days? If you do, and you get a longer wait, are you surprised? If you complain, odds are you won’t be complaining to the offsite managers who created the 14 day policy.
It only has to be kept secret from the offsite managers who created and enforced the 14 day policy punishments. When the policy went into effect, I guarantee that the folks making the appointments and their supervisors lodged complaints and that the complaints were ignored in a way that made it clear that the OMs were completely out of the loop and determined to stay that way.
When the enforcers made it clear that they didn’t want to know what was going on, they pretty much announced that no effort to keep anything secret needed to be made. No matter how open the process became, they weren’t going to know.
A larger percentage of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan and the Gulf War before them need much more intense treatments than veterans of previous conflicts:
I guess so. I just find it surprising that in an organization providing something like 85MM medical appointments per year, no one subject to these long waits ever demanded to speak to higher-ups, which might have alerted them to a vast disconnect between the reported waits and the actual waits.
I’m pretty sure the local managers, the higher-ups to whom a veteran might complain, already knew what was going on. The ones from whom it was hidden (or “hidden”) were the bosses in Washington, etc., and a veteran in Phoenix was very very unlikely to have demanded to speak to somebody that high up.
