DOJ Declines to Prosecute VA Fraudsters

Department of Justice declines to prosecute VA executives for using their official positions for their own financial benefit even after the Inspector Generals recommends their prosecution

Not Cleaning house: Justice Dept. won’t press charges against disgraced VA execs

We seem to be nearing the end of the saga of Diana Rubens and Kimberly Graves, the two Veterans Administration executives who were found to have gamed the system for plumb positions and generous relocation payments, though it’s probably not the outcome many government watchdogs may have wished. Not too long ago, Ed covered the story of how VA officials were reluctant to fire people accused of such misbehavior, regardless of how egregious the charges may be. Shortly after that, the policy was explained by Deputy VA Secretary Sloan Gibson who said, “You can’t fire your way to excellence.”

But surely when you get a referral to prosecute someone at the federal level, that’s the tipping point, right? Once the review is finished and your own watchdogs have sent the case over to the Justice Department to have them prosecuted, it’s time to turn the screws. As it turns out… not so much. (Government Executive)

The Justice Department will not pursue criminal charges against two former Veterans Affairs senior executives accused of using their positions of authority for personal gain.
The U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia declined a referral for criminal prosecution from the VA watchdog related to Diana Rubens, former director of the Veterans Benefits Administration’s Philadelphia office, and Kimberly Graves, former director of VBA’s St. Paul, Minn., regional office…
“The U.S. Attorney’s Office has notified the VA’s Office of the Inspector General of this decision and referred the matter to the VA for any administrative action that is deemed appropriate,” the office said in a statement. “The U.S. Attorney’s Office has no further comment on this investigation.”

This seems a good time to remind everyone of precisely how Sloan Gibson approached this question from the beginning.

“I’m not going to recommend, I’m not going to propose a disciplinary action that is based upon media coverage, or an opinion that is expressed in the IG report, if it is not supported by the evidence,” he said, adding that he knew his decision not to fire Rubens and Graves wasn’t going to “sit well, with virtually everybody.”

He’s not going to go around taking action based on an opinion expressed by the Inspector General’s office. Then why is it exactly that we have an office of the Inspector General in all the various cabinet departments in the first place? Their “opinions” are not worth the paper they are printed on, apparently, and can simply be disregarded. Of course, turning a report of misconduct over to the Justice Department these days doesn’t seem to be a very productive course of action anyway, so perhaps Sloan is on to something here.

You know, if the the VA were a fantastic humming machine, delivering its services expeditiously and well, I might allow a couple of errant supervisors to retire gracefully, rather than face the music.

But to neither fire the offenders nor prosecute obvious offenses seems like a slap in the face, not only to veterans, but to those federal workers who actually do their job while abiding by all most of the rules.

Justice; I don't think that word means what you think it means.

I Don't Think That Word Means What You Think It Means

VA admits: 'Accountability' doesn't mean firing anyone

The Department of Veterans Affairs admitted Wednesday that its definition of the word "accountability" doesn't mean firing officials involved in the healthcare scandal, and instead said it sees the term as meaning that the VA will be "transparent about what our goals are."

But that admission drew a sharp rebuke from House Veterans' Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller, R-Fla., who said the VA's definition of the word "accountability" shows there's still no accountability whatsoever at the VA.

"It seems the term 'accountability' has taken on a new meaning," VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson said in prepared testimony before the committee. "Instead of the dictionary definition — 'providing a record or explanation of one's conduct' — the term has become shorthand for firing people."

"Secretary McDonald and I want to reclaim the term 'accountability' in its fuller meaning, in the sense of being transparent about what our goals are and how well we achieve them, what taxpayers can expect us to achieve with each dollar we receive, what veterans can expect us to do for them, by when, and to what level of quality and satisfaction," he added.

And while Gibson did admit that "accountability" also means taking "appropriate actions" when things go wrong, he also said it means making sure VA workers are trained, and making sure the work environment is "free of fear."

Fear can be a very useful motivator. Some people might even avoid committing fraud for fear of getting caught and fired.

And, it means "rewarding people for exceptional performance."

There is very little evidence of exceptional performance at the VA. Certainly from no one in position in significant authority, or we wouldn't have had the VA scandal in the  first place

But the VA's definition of "accountability" didn't sit well with Miller, who tore up Gibson's definition in an extended statement.

"Quite honestly, I think the tone of your statement proves why we are so disappointed with the lack of accountability at VA because it illustrates that the department and its senior leaders still refuse to take responsibility for the corrosive culture plaguing VA," Miller said.

Miller also said he looked up the meaning of the word, and said the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as "an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions."

There comes some point in the life of an institution, particularly government institutions where the business of the survival and expansion of an institution becomes more important than the nominal mission of the institution. I've seen that up close and personal.

Government is Just What We Call the Things We Do Together

And what we seem to do is to reward incompetence and outright fraud. EPA punishes Gold King spill disaster contractor with… millions in new contract awards

It’s a banner day for thrift and spending control in the federal government. Earlier, Ed already talked about the cash bonanza at the VA, but that’s being followed up by breaking news from the Environmental Protection Agency. You probably recall that unpleasant little incident at the Gold King mine in Colorado where they spilled millions of gallons of toxic sludge into the local river system. Well, the contractor who was employed by the agency during that particular disaster has been identified and the EPA had a good, long talk with them. The result was to award them millions of dollars in new contract enhancements because… why quit now just when things are going so well? (Daily Caller)

Environmental Protection Agency officials awarded nearly $2.7 million in contract enhancements to Environmental Restoration LLC after the firm was involved in the Colorado Gold King Mine disaster that dumped three million gallons of yellow wastewater into a drinking water source for people in three states and the Navajo Nation.
The wastewater poured into the Animas River, a Colorado River tributary that supplies water to people in Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. The company also got a contract enhancement worth nearly $1 million from EPA on Aug. 4, 2015, the day before the spill, according to documents compiled by the Project on Government Oversight, a non-profit government watchdog group.

If you followed our earlier coverage of the lavish spending which goes on at the EPA you already know about the designer furniture sprucing up their offices and the number of employees on long term paid leave. The Daily Caller spoke to Adam Andrzejewski, founder of the Open The Books government transparency non-profit. Adam has been tracking this as closely as anyone and it seems as if this series of embarrassing revelations is reaching a tipping point.

“The EPA has taken the concept of ‘performance bonus’ much too far by giving their on-site contractor even more work after a natural disaster at Gold Ring,” Andrzejewski told TheDCNF.
“Had the spill soiled one of the EPA’s $730 office chairs, the contractor would have been fired on the spot. If the EPA spent as much time choosing contractors as they do shopping for furniture and military hardware, our environment would be a much cleaner place,” he said.

This isn’t anything new for the EPA. Let’s move on to the bonus round and look back to 2012 when the agency spent your tax dollars on a Chinese study of pig excrement. No… I’m not making that up.

Oh, I'm sure they choose their contractors carefully, being sure the feather their own nests.

But that's not all folks:  VA officials punished in 2014 for systemic fraud by … getting $142 million in bonuses

Remember when then-VA Secretary Eric Shinseki announced in May 2014 that bonuses would be canceled in light of the systemic fraud involving wait lists at numerous VA facilities? What Shinseki failed to mention was that the cancellation only impacted a small number of VA officials. USA Today reports that the Veterans Administration paid out more than $142 million in bonuses for 2014, despite the fact that veterans are waiting longer than ever for care:

The Department of Veterans Affairs doled out more than $142 million in bonuses to executives and employees for performance in 2014 even as scandals over veterans’ health care and other issues racked the agency.
Among the recipients were claims processors in a Philadelphia benefits office that investigators dubbed the worst in the country last year. They received $300 to $900 each. Managers in Tomah, Wis., got $1,000 to $4,000, even though they oversaw the over-prescription of opiates to veterans – one of whom died.
The VA also rewarded executives who managed construction of a facility in Denver, a disastrous project years overdue and more than $1 billion over budget. They took home $4,000 to $8,000 each. And in St. Cloud, Minn., where an internal investigation report last year outlined mismanagement that led to mass resignations of health care providers, the chief of staff cited by investigators received a performance bonus of almost $4,000.

So what happened to the Shinseki order?

But he only curtailed them for a sliver of VA executives — those in senior levels of the Veterans Health Administration, which oversees health care.
The agency has continued to pay performance-based bonuses to nearly half of agency employees, including in health administration, according to data provided to USA TODAY by the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee. In all, some 156,000 executives, managers and employees received them for 2014 performance.

The VA paid bonuses for “the biggest construction failure in VA history,” Denver7 reported last night. Despite poor performance on a massive construction project and being “hopelessly over budget,” managers got over $100,000 in performance bonuses:

Certainly, there are some people at the VA doing the best they can in an agency riddled with sloth and self-serving bureaucrats. However, there is some value in holding the entire agency to task for it's failures. It might encourage the ones doing good work to be more responsible for seeing that their co-workers to do so, and it might convince the slackers that their interests lie in going elsewhere.

Obama Administration Rushes to Fix VA

No New VA Patient schedule System until 2020

The Department of Veterans Affairs will not install a new patient scheduling system to all of its 153 hospitals and 50,000 users until 2020, according to contract documents released last week.

The VA views a new patient scheduling system as key to resolving problems which have consigned veterans to a waiting list limbo for months or years. In July, acting VA Secretary Sloan Gibson told the House Veterans Affairs committee the new scheduling system would be deployed in 2016.

The new timeline for the patient scheduling system, released last week, said VA expects to deploy an “Alpha” version to the first 300 users at two hospitals in 2016. That would be followed by a beta version to 700 users at five hospitals in 2018 and installation at all 153 hospitals in 2020.

But to be fair, their attempt at putting out the Obamacare website in 5 years didn't work out so well, so maybe they're just being realistic.

Jeez, what do think these things are, pyramids? I wonder about implementation after Cheop's Law has it's way:

Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.

Obamacare Schadenfreude Fireworks

See the complete weather report in the post below this one; I just hope the storm blows by in time for fireworks at the beach this evening.

The outrage of the the day is the confluence of two scandals, the Obamacare enrollment debacle and the Veterans affair wait list scandal. It seems that the administration took workers out of the VA application system and into Obamacare enrollment:

In another indicator of how low a priority veterans have with this administration, a whistleblower in Atlanta has revealed that VA employees were switched from processing VA applications to those of the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare.

Scott Davis told the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

“We don’t discuss veterans. We do not work for veterans. That is something that I learned after working there. Our customer is the VA central office, the White House and the Congress. The veterans are not our priority. So whatever the initiatives are or the big ticket items, that is what we focus on.”

He later appeared on the Neil Cavuto show and claimed that 17,000 applications for VA Healthcare were destroyed. He also said they’re “also looking into a backlog of over 600,000 pending applications for VA Healthcare.” Davis said the applications were purged as a way to deal with pressure from Washington D.C.

 As quipped by Ace:

Sometimes, in your Socialized Medicine Future, your health is going to be less important than servicing the current political needs of the Rulership Class.

You're just going to have to get used to this, peons.

By the way, the D.C. Circuit might nuke ObamaCare tomorrow (Which would have been yesterday, so I guess the ruling is still pending:

Remember the Halbig case? If not, catch up right now by re-reading this post from January, written after a D.C. district court judge ruled in Obama’s favor. O-Care is a famously complex law but the lawsuit that could end up demolishing it is surprisingly simple. In a nutshell, there’s a line buried deep in the statutory text that says federal subsidies for insurance premiums will be available to anyone who buys a plan on “an Exchange established by the State.” Question: Does Healthcare.gov, the exchange built by the federalgovernment after 34 states refused to build their own exchanges, qualify as an “Exchange established by the State”? Or do only state exchanges qualify? If it’s the latter, then millions upon millions of people who’ve signed up for O-Care through Healthcare.gov since October in the expectation that Uncle Sam will be paying part of their bill are in for a nasty surprise. The only fix that’s available (unless His Majesty tries some executive gambit, of course) is for Congress to amend the statute so that subsidies are available on the federal exchange too, but what are the odds of the House GOP agreeing to that? If the D.C. Circuit, which is set to rule any day now on the appeal of the earlier ruling, sides with the challengers against O, consumers will be forced to either come up with the money for their premiums themselves or drop their coverage. And if most of them choose to drop coverage, leading to a mass exodus of healthy people from various insurance risk pools, suddenly the White House is facing a death-spiral problem where hiking premiums on the remaining enrollees is the only way to pay for all the sick people still in the pool. That’ll lead to more dropped coverage, which means even higher premiums, and then it’s spiralmania.

It’s a magic bullet, aimed right at the heart of ObamaCare. What will the D.C. Circuit do?
. . .
It’s impossible for me to believe that the Supremes generally and John Roberts specifically, having eaten boatloads of crap from the right for upholding ObamaCare on the challenge to the individual mandate, are now going to pull a “never mind” and torch the whole thing because of a drafting ambiguity, but hope springs eternal for separation-of-powers aficionados like Turley. So much for the legal angle to all this. Here’s the political angle: What happens if the D.C. Circuit does nuke the subsidies eligibility for federal-exchange consumers? Would the House GOP even consider a bill reinstating those subsidies in exchange for other concessions of some kind? Before you say “hell no,” bear in mind that there’ll be a lot of voters out there PO’d that they’ve just lost their sugar from Uncle Sam and a lot of Democrats whispering to them that they could have that sugar back if only the damned Republicans didn’t want to see them suffer. Plenty of hay could be made before the midterms. Phil Klein, who has more faith in Boehner and crew than me, thinks there’s no way House Republicans would dare cave on subsidies, certainly not before SCOTUS has ruled on this at least. Hopefully he’s right — emphasis on “hopefully.” But maybe it’s all moot: If the GOP held out and refused to reinstate the subsidies, His Majesty would be tempted to issue some sort of dubious executive order (say, right around November 1st) proclaiming that the subsidies will be reinstated under HHS’s authority. That might be illegal, but even if it is, what’s anyone going to do to stop him? And even if there is a way to stop him by suing him over it, how will that stop him in time to prevent him from reaping the benefits at the polls on election day? Gulp.

Some paragraph breaks might have helped, even if they were only cosmetic. And speaking of hurricanes and death spirals:  Insurers seeking double-digit ObamaCare premium hikes in NY

Insurance firms participating in New York’s ObamaCare health exchange are seeking double-digit hikes for patient medical premiums in 2015, new figures reviewed by The Post reveal.

The average hike sought by insurers for individual plans is 12 percent—but a number of firms serving large numbers of patients want to boost individual premiums by nearly 20 percent.
. . .
The proposed rate increases call into question one of the goals of the Affordable Care Act — curbing runaway health-care costs.

Hey, New York. You voted for it. Enjoy in (we in Maryland deserve similar sympathy).

From the folks at Reason: Selling Obamacare: The weird, misleading propaganda behind the federal health care law

It might seem odd that Joanna Coles, editor in chief of Cosmopolitan, was invited to the White House for lunch. After all, why would the most powerful person in the world bother meeting with the editor of a publication that specializes in hot summer sex tricks and the year's most dangerous diet? Particularly on May 2, 2014, when just about every important political journalist was in town for the White House Correspondents Dinner, the annual gala where pols and press rub shoulders and bond over bottomless booze.

It's a long one; but if you're into such things, read the whole thing. Government by propaganda. Goebbels would have loved it.

Revising (Or Correcting!) The Declaration Of Independence

The past is not dead. It is not even past, as earnest historians (presumably progressive) attempt to revise the Declaration of Independence. From the Times:

Every Fourth of July, some Americans sit down to read the Declaration of Independence, reacquainting themselves with the nation’s founding charter exactly as it was signed by the Second Continental Congress in 1776.
Or almost exactly? A scholar is now saying that the official transcript of the document produced by theNational Archives and Records Administration contains a significant error — smack in the middle of the sentence beginning “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” no less.
The error, according to Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., concerns a period that appears right after the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the transcript, but almost certainly not, she maintains, on the badly faded parchment original.
That errant spot of ink, she believes, makes a difference, contributing to what she calls a “routine but serious misunderstanding” of the document.
The period creates the impression that the list of self-evident truths ends with the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” she says. But as intended by Thomas Jefferson, she argues, what comes next is just as important: the essential role of governments — “instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” — in securing those rights.
“The logic of the sentence moves from the value of individual rights to the importance of government as a tool for protecting those rights,” Ms. Allen said. “You lose that connection when the period gets added.”

The story reviews her very impressive detective work and concludes with her perspective:

“We are having a national conversation about the value of government, and it does get connected to our founding documents,” she said. “We should get right what’s in them.”

Oh, brother. Progressives are about to enter their Blue Period and righties are about a week away from being labelled 'period deniers'. . . 

Yeah, I know, not a word about Obamacare or schadenfreude, but read on:

IN OTHER NEWS: A timely surprise for libs was found in a recently discovered version of Lincoln's handwritten Gettysburg Address:

...testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure without national single payer health care.

Who knew?

Have a Happy 4th!

VA Tilts at Windmills as Veterans Wait

Strange priorities at the VA

The administrators at the Veterans Administration have apparently been busy while old soldiers waited to see a doctor, after all. Serving those who served is not necessarily a priority, but saving the planet is Job 1. Solar panels and windmills can be more important than the touch of a healing hand.
. . .
In the department’s words, it adopted a far more important mission to “become more energy efficient and sustainable, focusing primarily on renewable energy, energy and water efficiency, [carbon-dioxide] emissions reduction, and sustainable buildings.”

The green office isn’t merely a desk and telephone tucked away in the dark corner of a nondescript government building. It’s a substantial undertaking, with all the luxury, bells and whistles of a bureaucracy that means business. Eric K. Shinseki, who resigned as secretary in the wake of the VA scandal of the sin of omission, traveled the country to boast of the green initiative. In one instance, he traveled to Massachusetts to flick the switch at a half-million-dollar windmill project at the Massachusetts National Cemetery. “Nationally,” he said, “VA continues to expand its investment in renewable sources of energy to promote our nation’s energy independence, save taxpayer dollars, and improve care for our veterans and their families.

VA facilities have become littered with every scheme to banish carbon dioxide short of requiring visitors to hold their breath. Calverton National Cemetery spent $742,034 on solar panels. Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery spent $787,308. Not to be out-greened, the Riverside National Cemetery spent $1.3 million on its solar system.

The VA scandal did not happen for lack of money:

The  VA's problems are misplaced priorities; upper level administrators who wrote their own annual evaluations (a common phenomenon in government) with an eye to "earning" their expected annual bonuses by hiding the waiting lines rather than admitting to them, and fixing them.  80% of upper echelon VA executive "earned" bonuses in 2013. Now we're told that those bonuses, once awarded, cannot be revoked.  However, they can still fire all the administrators who had anything to do with the waiting lists. Oh wait, federal job retention rate is 99.45% annually.  "Civil" servants are more likely to die on the job than be fired.

The focus on "green" programs is a problem throughout the government.  Rather than focus on the job at hand (in this case treating veterans), administrators become engaged, and their interests diverted into the "green building" programs. This serves two functions. First, it gives administrators the sense of building something "lasting", a legacy, and not just handling the mundane administration of a large institution. Second, since much of the "green program" is contracted out to friends of the administration, it is a way of seeking approval from the capos.

While it might be nice to have "green energy" for the VA, they should be forcibly reminded that their first responsibility is to the veterans.

Linked at Pirate's Cove in the weekly "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup." Thanks, Teach!

No Obamacare Schadenfreude Today!

Obamacare had been largely replaced in the news by the VA Scandal, which has now been shoved to the back burner in favor of the "Unusual Case of Bowe Bergdahl."

The Obama administration is reported to be believers in "stray voltage", the idea that even bad coverage is better than continued hammering on the original issue:

. . .Officials in every White House crowbar the facts to make their cases. Administration officials over time have also learned how to turn lemons into lemonade, harnessing the frenzied news coverage from a perceived White House miscue to the president's advantage. Losing the news cycles between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. doesn't necessarily matter; if by the end of the saga you've got a coherent story to pitch, the frenzy has simply given you a larger audience who will listen to it. “Stray voltage,” the term Obama strategist David Plouffe used to describe this approach, is also a great buzzword that makes it look like you’ve got a theory for what might otherwise look like chaos. But this twist is a new, higher order of deception: creating the controversy for the purposes of milking it. . .

It sort of reminded me of an old childhood ditty:

Shinseki Out

I was watching C-Span when it happened, but here's the Washington Post article:

Eric K. Shinseki resigned Friday as secretary of veterans affairs, taking responsibility for a scandal in the VA health-care system over excessive waiting times and coverups of what he called “systemic” problems.

President Obama announced that he accepted Shinseki’s resignation after agreeing with his embattled VA secretary that he had become a “distraction” as the department struggles to deal with a huge increase of veterans in need of care after more than a decade of war overseas.

Obama made the announcement shortly after Shinseki apologized publicly Friday for what he called an “indefensible” lack of integrity among some senior leaders of the VA health-care system and announced several remedial steps, including a process to remove top officials at the troubled VA medical center in Phoenix.

Speaking after a meeting with Shinseki at the White House, Obama said Shinseki had offered him his resignation.

“With considerable regret, I accepted,” Obama said. “We don’t have time for distractions,” he added. “We need to fix the problem.”

He said Sloan D. Gibson, the deputy secretary of veterans affairs, is taking over as acting secretary.

The next question is how deep the blood bath will become.

That Mess at the VA

There are buckets of digits being spilled on the VA scandal, so I felt I should contribute or be left behind.

First, the crime.  Problems at the VA with service have long been known, and predate the current administration. I'm sure they even predate me.  The specific allegations being aired now are primarily that, at a large number of VA hospitals, wait times for medical treatment were extremely long, as much as 115 day, and, even worse, VA administrators were keeping double sets of books on the wait times, keeping veterans off the "official" computerized wait lists on double secret pencil and paper wait lists, to minimize the reporting of wait times so that they would remain eligible for performance bonuses.  At the very minimum, this constitutes some kind of fraud. Or if it doesn't, it should.

Among the other things that Preznit Obama campaigned on was a promise to reform the VA and improve the treatment of veterans. It appears his means of doing this was to appoint General Eric Shinseki as Secretary of the VA and lose interest, assuming his part was done.  Shinseki had made himself popular with liberals by opposing some aspects of Rumsfeld plans for the Iraq war, claiming that it would require several hundred thousand troops remaining in Iraq to keep the peace in post-war Iraq; a proposition which may still be valid by virtue of having never been tested in practice.

In that spirit, I present my prescriptions from the top on down.

Gen. Shinseki should do the honorable thing and commit hari-kiri resign. I don't particularly blame him for the crisis, but I do think that as the commander over this particular failure, he should accept the responsibility and leave on his own, or be removed from the command if necessary. He should be familiar with the concept.  I doubt that a military man was a good choice to manage a huge unwieldy civilian agency. Unlike a military hierarchy, it is much more difficult to control a largely unionized civilian work force, whose careers are almost entirely safe from anything short of videotaped acts of gross malfeasance. They appear to have taken this to heart and acted accordingly.

Now, I assume that like all other Federal agencies, the upper administration of the VA is largely populated with SES (Senior Executive Service) people, which according to Wikipedia, are the civilian equivalents of generals and admirals.  Unless these people can show that they were actively opposing, and working to reveal the problems in the agency, they should go too. Ignorance is no excuse. Any found to be complicit, or even aware of the wait list problem without making any attempt to fix it should be prosecuted to the greatest extent possible. Since the usual practice of Federal prosecutors is to overcharge, to force a favorable settlement, that should also be encouraged.  Possibly on grounds of treason (giving comfort to our enemies by denying aid to our veterans). I would allow any who wish to resign ahead of the investigation, but once the investigation has begun, no Get Out of Jail free cards allowed.

Now that giant bureaucracy at the VA itself. Anyone who assembled, touched, coached someone else to create or even knew about and overlooked should also be fired from government service, and forbidden any further government employment as proven dishonest and unreliable.

The whole pyramid of the VA hierarchy should be shortened and widened, with a decrease in the administrative overhead.  For every SES or GS-15 gone, they should be able to afford a new doctor at a VA hospital.

We should consider a program to privatize the VA hospitals, selling or even giving them, if necessary, along with their staff, to private health care providers.  Then veterans would be given vouchers for care.  We have this new shiny health care system.  Instead of the VA hospitals, permit each veteran currently eligible for VA medical benefits to buy a "gold" health care plan of his or her choice on the Obamacare exchange, paid for by the VA, including deductibles.  The hospitals and staffs of the former VA hospitals would still be available to treat these vets, under new private management.

As I said, I advance these proposals in the almost certain knowledge that they will not be followed. Already, my own Congressmen (over every vote I've had the opportunity to cast)  "Tax and Spend" Steny Hoyer has rushed to the defense of the VA bureaucracy:

Steny Hoyer: We Must Protect The Most Important Clients of the VA-- Democrat-Voting Government Bureaucrats

He says that the GOP is "politicizing" the VA scandal, apparently by refusing to go along with the standard operating Democrat procedure of stonewall, cover-up, distraction, and then saying "That was two years ago dude."

The House's No. 2 Democrat accused Republicans of exploiting the scandal that has enveloped the Veterans Affairs Department for political gain and said he is worried that civil servants could be swept up unfairly in a witch hunt.

Is there anyone in America apart from a union-serving progressive office-holder who sees the main problem with the VA scandal as exposing civil servants to unfair disciplinary measures?

It is incredible. We're only a few weeks of genuine coverage of this scandal and the Democrats are already hitting the Phony Scandal button.

Usually they'd wait for a nothing-to-see-here cook-the-books cover-up report for that.

I don't think there's any doubt about it... that is essentially the tactic that Republicans are trying to employ," Minority Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland told reporters Wednesday.
"In some cases there are huge fishing expeditions which are going on for millions of documents that goes beyond the realm of oversight and politicizes the issue very greatly."

Previous cover-ups have ended with IG's claiming they didn't have any "substantiation" for wrongdoing that was plainly going on.

The only way to get such substantiation is by getting the emails, as the Daily Beast did.

But of course Steny Hoyer doesn't want that -- he wants to protect his real constituents, government workers.

And, dammit, he's partly right.  We do blame the entrenched bureaucracy for this. They don't do it because they hate veterans or anything like that. They do it because the first job of any governmental authority is to preserve its own existence, and it's second is to expand its size and power and sense of entitlement. The actual nominal function of the agency is way down the priority list and  left to the bottom rung employees, and/or contractors. And they all vote almost entirely for the democrats because democrats are the party of the unbridled government.

The VA system is the purest form of single-payer health care as practiced here in the United States. Take a good long look at what Nancy Pelosi intends for the rest of us.

The Seven Steps of Scandal

As performed by the Obama Administration, and as abetted by the MSM (according to Mary Katharine Hamm).

Step 1: “We’re just finding out about this ourselves and are as appalled as anyone over these allegations. We vow to get to the bottom of this and, if true, right this wrong swiftly and thoroughly. Nothing less than the honor of our nation and our people is at stake, and that will not come to harm on my watch.”

Step 2: “We are investigating ourselves right now to make sure we get to the bottom of this. It’s important that we get all the facts from ourselves, and in the meantime it would be inappropriate for ourselves to answer questions about the investigation we’re conducting on ourselves.”

Step 3: “Didn’t I just tell you we started an investigation of ourselves? Also, we noted our outrage. I cannot possibly make any statements about the very obvious wrongdoing that occurred on our watch until the investigation we’re conducting of ourselves is completed, printed on paper and in my hands. Anything else would jeopardize the integrity of our investigation of ourselves. Is that what you want?”

Step 4: “Only crazy wingers even ask questions about stuff like this. Are you a crazy winger? Do you think it’s a grand conspiracy in which the President of the United States conspired to personally hurt veterans? Do you think that’s an appropriate question to ask?”

Step 5: Wait six months, refer to formerly outrageous scandal as phony.

Step 6: Slow walk investigation and especially the release of requested and possibly incriminating documents for a year or more.

Step 7: “Oh, that ‘scandal’? Dude, that was a year ago. Who’s still talking about that?”

It does have a certain familiar cadence to it.

We're all acquainted with the "12 Steps" of Alcoholics Anonymous and similar groups, but did you know the "13 Question Method)? It's the one to use...

In 2012 Politifact Called VA Reform "Promise Kept"

From Ace's: In 2012, PolitiFact Rated Obama's Promise to "Make the VA a Leader in National Health" A "Promise Kept"

However, in light of recent events they've revised their rating. . .

PolitiFact: We rate this claim as "Democratic" and therefore true.

Also from Ace, back in 2011, liberal pundit hack Paul Krugman (and others) was lauding the VA system as proof that the socializes system performed better than the sort of capitalist system that the rest of us have.

. . . Paul Krugman in 2011 wrote of the VA’s “huge success story”:

Multiple surveys have found the VHA providing better care than most Americans receive, even as the agency has held cost increases well below those facing Medicare and private insurers…the VHA is an integrated system, which provides health care as well as paying for it. So it’s free from the perverse incentives created when doctors and hospitals profit from expensive tests and procedures, whether or not those procedures actually make medical sense.

Krugman added, “Yes, this is ‘socialized medicine’…But it works, and suggests what it will take to solve the troubles of US health care more broadly.”

Indeed, if the problem is old people taking up too much of the federal budget with medical care, indeed, letting them die waiting for a chance to see the doctor will solve it.

A Great Rant from Ace on the VA "Scandal"

Ultimately, he brings it around to the failure of the press to keep the heat on the President.  True enough, but basically, the press doesn't care about the military or veterans enough to keep the heat on them, unless it's convenient to the current attack on a Republican incumbent.

But this (extended passage) caught my funny bone:

. . .The priorities of a bureaucracy -- not that bullshit you see in its mission statement, which is for public consumption, bait for the rubes -- are very similar to the biological imperatives of living organism. In order of priority, the biological imperatives of the Bureaucratic Collective Life Form are as follows:

1. Protect our phony-baloney jobs.

All organisms' highest priority is survival. And fold into this other self-interested survival-like goals: raises, comforts.

There's an important sub-priority here:

1. a. Protect the Phony-Baloney Jobs of Our Fellow Government Workers.

This is crucial. The more the worst government worker can get away with without losing his job, the more the average government worker can get away with without losing his job.

All guilds and unions are devoted to protecting the jobs of their worst performing members.

All bureaucrats have a secret guild interest in permitting the worst, laziest, most useless, most misbehaving government workers to keep their jobs (so long as allowing them to keep their jobs does not threaten other jobs -- that is, so long as the bad bureaucrat is not so notoriously awful that he jeopardizes all other Phony Baloney jobs by remaining on the payroll).

In addition, once someone loses their Phony Baloney job at the government, they may begin ratting on those in the bureaucracy also doing their Phony Baloney jobs very poorly; every fired government worker is thus a potential Snitch Threat to other government workers.

For that reason, bureaucrats will work hard to keep other bureaucrats on the payroll, ensuring their continued loyalty to the Guild of Phony Baloney Jobs.

Government workers prioritize imperative 1 and 1.a. to the highest degree possible while still observing imperative 2...

2. Do as little work as possible.

Note that here I'm not actually attacking the bureaucracy for being lazy-- most organisms are hard-coded to do as little work as possible. They store up energy for the coming time they'll have to face off against a brontosaurus or somethin'. "Doing as little work as possible" can also be called, more charitably, a strong impulse towards efficient allocation of the precious resource of stored energy in the form of fat.

But the point is, left to its own devices, any bureaucracy will, of course, do as little as possible while still achieving its most important priority, Protecting Our Phony Baloney Jobs.

Meanwhile, they also have an imperative to increase the scope and grandeur of the jobs they're doing as poorly as possible:

3. Expand turf, power, and responsibilities.

Note that this conflicts directly with Priority 2, Doing as Little Work as Possible. You would think that someone who wants to Do As Little Work As Possible would shy away from taking on greater power and responsibility. But they don't.

Higher organisms, while lazy, are also keenly egotistical, and farm social status based on how many other organisms they dominate and boss around every day.

If you boss no one around, you're a peon; if you boss a couple of people around, you're a low-level manager; if you boss a bunch of people around, you're a mid-level manager; and if you boss a real mess of people around, you're a genuine Boss.

Government bureaucracies are warped on this score due to the excessive nature of modern governmental power: While a peon at, say, Domino's pizza cannot expand his social status much while he's still a peon -- there's no one at Domino's he can boss around, as he's low-man on the totem pole -- a government peon can boss people around. Namely, ordinary citizens and corporations.

Due to the inherent nature of the modern, dysfunctional political system, in which The Government has power over everything, people who can't rise from the level of peon in the bureaucratic system can nevertheless boss the hell out of people outside the bureaucratic system.

And they do. Witness the IRS scandal. . . 

Possibly a bit overstated, but it certainly has a grain of truth. The way I see it, there are two levels at an organization like the VA that actually "feel" the mission.  The very bottom, the nurses and doctors who actually deliver the care, and the ultimate boss, and a few of his/her henchpersons like poor Shinseki and a few aides, who have to answer to the Preznit, or get dragged before a congressional committee.

The great mass of people in the middle, who answer to those above them, and boss the people below them aren't really invested in the mission, and who respond much as Ace outlines above.  They exist to "support" the people at the bottom, but in reality, and especially in government, they exist, to the extent that they do anything at all, to "regulate" the people at the bottom.  Rules continually get elaborated to prevent "irregularities" and outdated rules are never reviewed and revoked. Departments vie for control of those at the bottom, the reward being an expansion of their own power, and hence their status and pay.

Left to themselves and given infinite resources, I'm sure that private business would also develop similar sclerosis, because people are people.  And I'm sure larger ones do, to some extent. But the pressure of competition, and the drive for profit acts as a check on those tendencies.