Posted on 05/29/2014 10:15:50 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
A memorable moment from last night’s House hearing courtesy of Florida’s Corrine Brown, whose congressional legacy is already secure. I’ll say this for her: It takes guts to double down on your faith in the VA after yesterday’s IG report, at a moment when more prominent Democrats like Al Franken and Jeanne Shaheen are running in terror from Shinseki.
Then again, it’s a fine line between “guts” and “reckless stupidity.” Remember this story from a few weeks ago?
Three mental health administrators at the Malcom Randall VA Medical Center in Gainesville have been placed on administrative leave after U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs officials found a “secret” waiting list of more than 200 patients, a local union president said Thursday.
The director of the North Florida/South Georgia Veterans Health System, Thomas Wisnieski, however, said what officials found was a paper list of patients who needed appointment callbacks. That list isn’t considered proper protocol, Wisnieski said.
Wisnieski said the list was not a secret waiting list, but he also said he did not know about it until a VA team discovered it while visiting the hospital Tuesday for a review…
Some of the patients on the list had been waiting six months or more for an appointment when the goal of VA hospitals is to schedule appointments within 14 days of getting a call, she said.
A few hours before Brown made this speech at the hearing, Florida Gov. Rick Scott announced that he was suing the VA in Florida for “stonewalling” state health inspectors. Local VA hospitals have turned away the inspectors repeatedly on grounds that Florida has no authority over federal hospitals, which may be a winning argument in court but looks ludicrously shady now that the public’s paying close attention to the scandal. (For Scott, who’s up for reelection this fall, it’s a brilliant bit of retail politics.) Speaking of which, if you read nothing else today, make sure you read Hal Scherz’s piece in the Journal recounting “war stories” from doctors who worked at the VA. If there’s any government agency that needs health inspectors peering over its shoulder, it’s this one:
In my experience at VA hospitals in San Antonio and San Diego, patients were seen in clinics that were understaffed and overscheduled. Appointments for X-rays and other tests had to be scheduled months in advance, and longer for surgery. Hospital administrators limited operating time, making sure that work stopped by 3 p.m. Consequently, the physician in charge kept a list of patients who needed surgery and rationed the available slots to those with the most urgent problems.
Scott Barbour, an orthopedic surgeon and a friend, trained at the Miami VA hospital. In an attempt to get more patients onto the operating-room schedule, he enlisted fellow residents to clean the operating rooms between cases and transport patients from their rooms into the surgical suites. Instead of offering praise for their industriousness, the chief of surgery reprimanded the doctors and put a stop to their actions. From his perspective, they were not solving a problem but were making federal workers look bad, and creating more work for others, like nurses, who had to take care of more post-op patients.
At the VA hospital in St. Louis, urologist Michael Packer, a former partner of mine, had difficulty getting charts from the medical records department. He and another resident hunted them down themselves. It was easier for department workers to say that they couldn’t find a chart than to go through the trouble of looking. Without these records, patients could not receive care, which was an unacceptable situation to these doctors. Not long after they began doing this, they were warned to stand down.
According to Scherz, the best news a vet could get from the VA was that the service he needed was unavailable. In that case he’d be sent to a doctor in private practice, who wouldn’t stick him on a secret wait list to languish for months. Even doctors within the agency, in other words, preferred to voucher this problem out in the name of getting prompt care for their patients.
As for Brown, she’s got to nothing to worry about in terms of an electoral backlash when, not if, this assurance of VA quality blows up in her face. Like most House incumbents, her seat is safe as can be. She won her last election by nearly 45 points.
(VIDEO-AT-LINK)
Corrine Brown? ROTFL! That’s funny. She couldn’t find her butt with both hands.
this lump of dumb makes sheila jackson lee look like a Mensa Society member.
Brown is definitely the color of whatever is flowing from her mouth
The intellectual paragon of the Congressional Black Ka-kas....
Corrine Brown would never have to worry about being put to death by the State of Florida, even if the Supreme Court didn’t declare the 70 IQ threshold law Unconstitutional.
Harvey Pekar...author, commentator, cartoonist and VA clerk had this pegged in his comic book and film of the same name "American Splendor"
See the trailer at about 0.35, 1.59 and 2.14 mins for real video from his VA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjjJmwXtEGA
also in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ruqojr2M3o
I’ve long been familiar with American Splendor.
As for Brown, she’s got to nothing to worry about in terms of an electoral backlash when, not if, this assurance of VA quality blows up in her face. Like most House incumbents, her seat is safe as can be. She won her last election by nearly 45 points.
The fact she won her last election by that wide a margin tells more of the stupidity of the voters in Corinne Brown’s district than the congresswoman herself.
I don’t get it. Every employee at the VA knows the policy is to get the vet in within 14 days. Yet every employee at the VA KNOWS it’s not happening and hasn’t been happening for years.
I know McCain was told about this last year because a doctor that works with PTSD patients said she notified his office. I believe lots of congress people got anonymous letters and emails. Now congress is in a cya mode.
I had my tonsils removed at the VA hospital in 1974. The doctor was from Pakistan and I couldn’t understand half of what he said. I almost bled to death.
Later in my room I reamed an old nurse out and three old vets in the room with me said they were happy someone had told the old bitch off. They were treating people like pieces of you-know-what.
So this has been going on for years.
And there’s not a smidgeon of corruption in the IRS. Move along, nothing to see.
As a medical student in Chicago in the 80’s I met the WORST nurse of my life at the VA.
The first day on my medicine rotation she says “ You here for a couple of months I been here for 20 years, you don’t tell me nothing”.
She used to sit at the nursing station and smoke those thin brown little cigarettes and ignore any orders. At night the old bitch would tie down all the Vets in 4 point restraints on metal bed pans so she wouldn’t have to deal with them.
Every morning my intern would come in and she would announce in a loud voice so that the witch would hear “ Come on, lets free the slaves”.
We went to our attending physician to complain, and he told us he had tried for years to get her fired. At that time it would have taken almost an act of Congress to get that torturer fired.
I hope theres a special place in Hell where she is tied to a bedpan.
I called my congressman and I was told some major changes took place at that hospital.
I don’t have any complaints about the Houston VA. I now go to a satellite clinic and there’s no waiting. I loved my two nurses at the big hospital and told them so. They were really thankful for the recognition. Now, with that said, I haven’t had anything seriously wrong with me....YET.
But when I checked in after having lost my insurance, and had had a heart attack, I got an MRI on my heart almost immediately. I once had a bad cold and went to the doctor and my nurse came out to speak to me. I told her I needed some antibiotics so she went and told the doctor then came back out and told me I could pick up the meds at the pharmacy and go home. I wasn’t even charged for the visit. Like I said. I loved those two kind black ladies. One had been at the VA for more than 25 years and the other was much younger and very beautiful. Hey, I brought them produce from my garden. They hugged me every time I came in. And they were both very strong Christians.
The nurse I have now is a white guy and so far I have no complaints. The doctor I have now has been with the VA for 15 years. She went to med school in Nigeria. So far I have no complaints about her.
The eye exam I got the other day was performed by a georgeous ex Navy Wave in her late 20s and she truly loves veterans. I saluted her and she said “No, I should salute you.”
I asked her assistant about the Phoenix VA scandal and he said “I don’t understand how they did that. We have to keep so many double sets of records there’s no way you could get away with it.” That was before it came out that they were keeping two sets of records and destroying some.
So, hopefully, it’ll all stay good even when I need some serious treatment.
I have friends, husband and wife that go to the VA hospital in Gainesville, FL .
Talked to him 2 days ago concerning his treatment.
He said he has no complaints. His has a skin condition and they send him to a private practice in town. Same with his wife. She uses private dr.s.
He told me he never has trouble being seen.
He gets treated, free meds, and they pay him mileage for his trip to the facility.
First of all, the Republican majority Florida House refused to do anything about the district even with the cover of USSC ruling that took a lot of teeth out of the racially drawn untouchable status, even when having two new ones to incorporate in its latest redistricting mandated by the 2010 census. What was their answer? To make sure that the districts of conservative first termers Allen West and Sandy Adams were so cut up as to not give them a snowballs chance in hell of being re-elected. They let the Democrats define the table and rolled over in their Progressive suits to make sure nobody was mad at them.
She was first elected in 1992 when that new district was created for specifically that purpose. Almost before getting into the front door of the capitol building, she was spoofed into giving her opinion about the ethnic cleansing in Fredonia. Hook, line and sinker went all the way to the gullet in her zeal to look informed and intelligent which she has eclipsed in this latest utterance. http://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/13/us/isn-t-freedonia-next-to-oz.html
The Republicans even ran a black woman, retired military officer and subsequent Lt. Governor against her and could not break the stupid quotient of the LIV’s that are predominate in that district.
She is a true embarrassment to the voting public at large in Northeast Florida and we have just come to expect the bilge flowing from her mouth as SOP. I can’t place a pecking order of salience of that totem pole between her, Sheila Lee with the Mars Flag planted by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, or the geological expert Hank Johnson to the buoyancy of pacific islands.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/dgreenfield/sheila-jackson-lee-racist-and-moron/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7XXVLKWd3Q
Being a black congresswoman, ain’t being a vet.
Go back to your lunches with the other Democratic Socialists, like your kindred Sheila Jackson Lee.
Corrine Brown’s district has the dumbest people in Florida. It is a black majority district.
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