Posted on 06/17/2014 7:42:55 PM PDT by smoothsailing
June 17, 2014
‘They don’t care.”
As Obama administration officials pivot like haywire jewelry-box ballerinas to divert attention away from the nationwide Veterans Affairs disgrace, a reader who has been fighting the system urged me to urge Capitol Hill and the American public to stay focused.
This former Special Forces soldier and medic served his country for 25 years. He worked in the health-care field managing military field medical clinics.
“I know how health care is supposed run, even in austere or low-budget environments,” he says. And in his nightmarish, ongoing experience, the VA is an epic, deadly, monstrous failure.
He minces no words: “They’re getting billions of dollars and they treat veterans like s - - t. There’s no accountability, no buy-in, among civilian unionized employees. We mean nothing to them. It’s like going to the DMV for your health care.”
Over the past four years, the veteran tells me, he has been under direct VA care for two major line-of-duty-related injuries, including one combat-related injury.
One of the medical centers that treated him — or rather mistreated him and maltreated him — is the Coatesville, Pa. VA.
It’s the same facility where four vets died due to medical malpractice, leading to nearly $1.4 million in settlements to vets’ families, according to The Center for Investigative Reporting.
The harrowing cases included two fatal failures to monitor patients; improper management of a psychiatric patient; and wrongful diagnosis or misdiagnosis of a patient.
These details are all too familiar to my reader. “I have been misdiagnosed, had a missed diagnosis, and had delays of care lasting months,” he says. “My records have been lost, changed, split, and mismanaged.”
He has experienced firsthand the same “slow-walking” of care that millions of other VA patients...
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Absolutely right
Just like the schools are run to give the “teachers” incomes, not for the benefit of the students, and the “universities” are run to enrich the administrators
HOORAY Michelle Malkin! BTTT!
I remember doing my first VA rotation in Med School well. I did rotations in 4 other VAs in the ensuing years and found them all the same. Thirty years ago but I am sure little has changed. It was clear patient care was never a high priority anywhere. It was where I learned the 11th Rule of the House of God. “If you don’t care it doesn’t matter.”. The converse is true as well. “If you don’t matter we don’t care.”
It was very hard working there because I did care but I didn’t matter so one quickly learned there was only one person you could depend on, yourself. If the patient needed it you had to do it. Push the wheelchair to Radiology or stain the slide. In 6 months you learned how to do everything yourself.
I swear to God, one day I took a purple top to the STAT lab from the “ER” (if you could call it that without laughing or crying) where I had drawn it on a stroking patient so I could get coats before anti coagulating. The guy at the lab said, “Just put it there with the other STATS” and pointed to a half filled tray of purple tops. I swear to God, most of them had cobwebs and dust on them. After I “motivated” him, i went to CT scan and the tech had turned off the tube at 3:30 on Friday afternoon. I had to “motivate” him, too. I told him to fire it up or I would and he knew I knew how. If you can take care of folks at a VA you can do it ANYWHERE becausebTHEY DON’T CARE.
As I mentioned on another thread, I’ve been waiting eleven months to be assigned a new PCP after my old one retired last July.
Thanks for your posts, wastoute. Thanks for caring.
My 33 year old son works at a VA hospital in Oregon. He was trained in the Navy as a cook on a boomer, was hired in the kitchen. He told me within 6 months there, that no one can get fired. He marveled at how his co workers can not show up for work for 4 to 5 days in a row and then one day show up, nothing ever happens.
He said, “Mom you cannot get fired from the VA, one thing MIGHT get you fired, if they can prove you intentionally killed a veteran patient.”
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