Posted on 05/19/2014 9:05:17 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Veterans with serious heart conditions, gangrene, and even brain tumors waited months for care at the Albuquerque VA hospital, a whistleblowing doctor tells The Daily Beast.
Add Albuquerque, New Mexico’s to the growing list of VA hospitals accused of keeping secret waiting lists to hide delays for veterans seeking medical care. And it may already be too late to get to the truth and find out what harm, if any, was done to veterans there—VA officials are already destroying records to cover their tracks, a whistleblower inside the hospital tells The Daily Beast.
Last month, word broke that the Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Phoenix kept a secret waiting list that allegedly led to dozens of preventable deaths. The VA’s inspector general was brought in to investigate the charges and hasn’t yet found any deaths in Phoenix linked to wait times, but his investigation is ongoing. Since then five other facilities have come under fire, leading to calls for VA Secretary Eric Shinseki to step down. And now there’s Albuquerque’s. The evidence for this new secret list may be hard to track down, however.
“The ‘secret wait list’ for patient appointments is being either moved or was destroyed after what happened in Phoenix,” according to a doctor who works at the Albuquerque VA hospital and spoke exclusively with The Daily Beast. “Right now,” the doctor said, “there is an eight-month waiting list for patients to get ultrasounds of their hearts. Some patients have died before they got their studies. It is unknown why they died, some for cardiac reasons, some for other reasons.”
There’s no proof yet that veterans died while waiting for treatment, like what allegedly happened in Phoenix....
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
This is murder by denial of care, and its coverup.
I am surprised Daily Beast is reporting this.
Everywhere I look on the web I find articles saying the TEa Party is responsible for cutting vet benefits. Surely, there must have been something else impacting votes against the budget and appropriations in 2014. At least I would hope so.
I guarantee that all of the VA’s hospitals are complicit. These are not isolated instances.
Was the Tea Party in power?
No.
Were Democrats and GOP? Yes.
I think we need an investigation by the House of Representatives. The Senate would try to cover up the facts.
I’ve never been in a VA hospital, but I have known nurses working at one.
its a federal government bureaucracy, pure and simple. One need not say anything more to understand the situation.
Are VA Hospitals also staffed by union employees like SEIU or AFSCME? Avoid those as well, if you can.
They’re trying to blame it on the sequester, which was an egg Obama hatched but subsequently has placed blame on the GOP.
Obama promised a lot but it hasn't come through and it looks like the media has managed to put the blame where I don't think it belongs. If I am wrong, I have some personal reckoning to do.
It is obvious for all to see that the Democrats are stalling Veterans to use the money to buy votes.
Obama should be impeached....be criminally charged, convicted of denying medical care to veterans and imprisoned for life!!! Shinseki should be fired and rot in prison for life!!! These evil, vile, cold hearted, low life Democrat vermin should be scorned by all decent Americans!!!
AFGE.
BTW, I was AFSCME when I was at the state unemployment office. Always wanted to get elected as a delegate to the RNC, as AFSCME would have had to pay all my expenses. They had that rule, of course, for their members going to the DNC, but I was prepared to sue them if they balked.
“The willingness of a small percentage of military personnel to join extremist groups during the 1990s because they were disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war is being replicated today” ~ DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, 16 April 2009.
President Obama’s Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano apologized to veterans after a report issued by her department said troops returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were at risk for being recruited by right-wing extremists.
Sooooooo, I suppose this administrations solution is to let the Veteran’s die...If you fear a group enough and you control their health care, kill em.
Impeached? He could behead a troop of girl scouts on the White House lawn during the Easter Egg roll, butcher them, barbecue them and serve them to all the participants and he still wouldn’t be impeached. And if you criticized him about it, the press would say “it’s a black thing” and accuse you of being a racist tea bagging rethuglican for bringing it up while licking their fingers and asking Michelle what kind of “awesome” spice rub they’re using and beg for more of that “deliciously yummy” macaroni & cheese and a refill of their Kool-aid.
Sad....but....i believe you are right!!! Still......the man, Obama is a murderer, first in Benghazi and now with his veteran death panels!!!
More than a few VA hospitals, for years, were ‘training’ hospitals for foreign medical grads wanting to work in the US. Some were very good, some were not - in part because they didn't want to work as hard as the US residency programs traditionally had US medical school graduates work back then. When these VA training programs were taken over and amalgamated with US medical school-based training programs, things got better.
The problem is that it's a government-run system, and as such incompetence gets rewarded, people don't get fired, and problems are often dealt with by ‘promoting’ people out of the positions in which they were not doing a good job. I've spent time at several VA hospitals over the years that were affiliated with universities I was at. I've seen some very committed people, including young enthusiastic nurses, be ‘shot down’ by those who had grown comfortable in a lesser pace of work.
It's kind of ironic to me that after years of some really horrendous care at some VA hospitals, without any scrutiny, they are now getting the scrutiny that was sorely needed years ago.
The VA hospital system has, over the years, done a wonderful job in specific areas - such as spinal cord injury patients, the blind, and care of those who have lost limbs. They fell flat in several other areas.
The secret waiting lists are appalling. This is something I never saw at the VA hospitals I spent time at. We, as a country, made a pact with those who put their lives on the line to protect us and our way of life. We promised to provide them with quality health care. This is a promise that must be kept.
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