Free Republic

The Memphis VA Medical Center has yet another medical records backlog, The Daily Caller has learned — this one estimated at three to five months long. According to the whistleblower, who provided the photo of this second set of medical records piling up at the Memphis VA Medical Center, the individual responsible for scanning in these records is Carnell Clark, an employee at the facility who is currently busy helping to catch up on a backlog TheDC exposed in June. Sandra Glover, the spokeswoman for the Veteran Integrated Services Network 9, told TheDC the records are for “Intensive Care Unit...

The VA’s defenders insist that the wait-list scandal demonstrates a need for better funding, but how does the agency ensure that its current funding levels are used efficiently? After all, the VA has seen a 78% increase in funding over the last six budget cycles, and its budget has grown more on a percentage basis than any other Cabinet-level agency during that time. All of that cash got used properly and effectively, right?Wrong. Huffington Post’s David Wood does solid work in analyzing a recent audit of the VA, which found that as many as 13,000 employees have been misclassified...

Issac Sims left Iraq alive, but not unscathed. The lingering effects of a serious head injury and the emotional trauma wrought by the sights and sounds of war never left him. On Sunday, with the demons of untreated post-traumatic stress disorder roiling his mind, Sims grabbed a rifle and started firing off shots in and outside his family’s modest home on Kansas City’s East Side. ******* Officers summoned tactical teams to surround the area. After a standoff of about five hours, police said, Sims emerged and pointed the rifle at officers. They fired. And Sims was dead at the age...

There's triple trouble with electronic health records: patient safety, medical privacy, and data security. And there are at least eight hazards. But much taxpayer money has been thrown at the highly speculative, untested EHR for political and profit purposes. And there are at least eight hazards. But much taxpayer money has been thrown at the highly speculative, untested EHR for political and profit purposes. England has already tried and failed. The National Health Service, which serves a population of 53 million, began building a national EHR system in 2002. By 2007, it missed key deadlines. In 2011, the $20 billion...

As the death toll at the nation's VA hospitals continues to mount, the Obama administration has shown that it is not completely incapable of changing the insides of those facilities. According to an e-mail from a dentist in the scandal-plagued department, the hospitals could not see veteran patients on time or effectively care for them, but they managed to promote gay, bisexual, and transgender political issues last month. The Catholic group TFP Student Action received this e-mail: I am a dentist at the VA [U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs] in (name withheld). Yesterday as I was leaving work, I noticed...

The Department of Veteran Affairs is coming under mounting pressure from Democrats and Republicans to take back bonuses for senior staff who were in charge at VA medical centers when appointment times were falsified to cover up treatment delays for patients, The Washington Post reported. House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller said the VA secretary has the authority "to rescind these bonuses" within a year after they were paid. "I am calling on him to take this action where he deems appropriate," said Miller, a Florida Republican. Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/VA-veterans-bonuses-hospitals/2014/07/08/id/581433#ixzz36u25oGwt Urgent: Should Obamacare Be Repealed?...

Federal investigators are probing a whistleblower's allegations that applications for veterans seeking health care benefits may have been improperly purged from the VA's Health Eligibility Center in suburban Atlanta. Eligibility Center program specialist Scott Davis .. that health benefit applications for more than 10,000 veterans may have been improperly purged from ... Davis said the VA placed him on paid administrative leave after he filed the complaints

<p>While it is just a tragic anecdote, the latest story surrounding the chronic and too often fatal inefficiency of Veterans Affairs hospitals is illustrative of a much larger problem.</p> <p>“A veteran who collapsed in an Albuquerque Veteran Affairs hospital cafeteria, 500 yards from the emergency room, died after waiting 30 minutes for an ambulance,” the Associated Press reported on Thursday. “Officials at the hospital Thursday confirmed it took a half an hour for the ambulance to be dispatched and take the man from one building to the other, which is about a five minute walk.”</p>

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.

"...we actually put incoming applications aside so we could focus on the ACA related applications that came in over last summer."

The head of the Office of the Medical Inspector for Veterans Affairs has retired, just over a week after a scathing letter and report criticized that office for failing to adequately respond to complaints from whistleblowers and downplaying the severity of problems at some VA facilities. (Snip)Pierce had come to the VA as Deputy Medical Inspector in January 2002 and served as Medical Inspector since November of 2004, according to his VA bio. He served on active duty for thirty years in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. A letter and report sent to the White House last Monday by Carolyn

Believe it or not, it was 10 years ago this month that Barack Obama, then a candidate for the U.S. Senate, introduced himself to America with a speech that shook the Fleet Center in Boston. The main theme of that Democratic convention was the litany of George W. Bush's failures — an unpopular and unending war in Iraq, a faltering image abroad, a stagnating middle class. Obama gave eloquent voice to those frustrations, arguing that all of them could be addressed if only we reunited the electorate. Probably Obama himself would not have guessed then that he would ascend to...

Attention, veterans: Ignore your 2014 Department of Veterans Affairs calendar. Independence Day does not fall on July 3 this year. About 357,000 VA calendars given to veterans across most of Florida, southern Georgia and Puerto Rico mistakenly label Thursday, July 3, as Independence Day and remind veterans that VA outpatient clinics are closed today for the holiday. Apologies to the Founding Fathers. The Fourth of July still falls on July 4. So VA clinics actually will be closed Friday, not today. A VA spokeswoman said the error was not noticed by agency proofreaders before the calendar went to the printer...

Politicians have always touted their support for military veterans back home. The willingness to expend federal dollars to provide the best care possible is popular across the partisan spectrum and is rarely cause for controversy. But the issue has been turned on its head in recent months, with the fallout from the Veterans Affairs scandal prompting even the Obama administration to admit a “corrosive culture” at the VA affecting facilities across the country. It’s also invited criticism of vulnerable House and Senate Democrats from Republican candidates and outside groups. For Republican challengers and operatives, the VA scandal offers a striking...

ATLANTA | Federal investigators are probing a whistleblower's allegations that applications for veterans seeking health care benefits may have been improperly purged from the VA's Health Eligibility Center in suburban Atlanta. Eligibility Center program specialist Scott Davis told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that health benefit applications for more than 10,000 veterans may have been improperly purged from the Health Eligibility Center's national data system in DeKalb County. The center doesn't process all applications, but helps manage the national enrollment computer system and offers enrollment guidance for VA hospitals across the country.

(CNSNews.com) -- The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has 59,297 employees – 17.3 percent out of 342,089 workers total -- that make $100,000 or more in yearly salary, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Among those employees, 18,709 of them earn a salary of $180,000 or more.An OPM database, FedScope, contains historical data on the federal civilian workforce going back to 1998. The database holds information about civilian federal workers employed by most Executive Branch agencies (excluding intelligence agencies, the White House, and the Office of the Vice President) and some Legislative Branch agencies. It does...

Doug Chase, a Vietnam veteran who was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2011. In 2012, his wife, Suzanne, tried to move his medical care to a nearby Veterans Affairs hospital. “It was so difficult for him to take the ambulance ride into Boston, we wanted to be closer.” They waited about four months and never heard anything -- Chase died later that year. But two weeks ago, he got a letter, from the VA in Bedford, saying he could now call to make an appointment to see a primary care doctor. “It was addressed to my husband and I...

If the VA scandal weren't bad enough, read the article below and see exactly how the Obama administration treats those with REAL medical problems vs. those who want to change their s.e.x. Vets are dying waiting for treatment while men who want to look and sound and feel like women get seen and trreated. If it doesn't make you mad, why not? SECRET TO SURVIVING OBAMA'S VA: S-E-X A bit from the article: “My dad has believed his whole life that he is really a woman,” said Kori Peterson. “He currently has appointments for a rhinoplasty (a nose job) and...

Back in the Middle of June there were calls for a special prosecutor for the VA Scandal (or scandals). In the middle of June, there were calls for a Special Prosecutor for the VA Scandal by Congressmen John Barrow, Bill Cassidy, and Rick Allen. It seems serious crimes have been comitted by people work in the VA System. Whistleblowers have been retaliated against. One article on this is: Barrow, Allen call for special prosecutor Another is: VA SCANDAL: Cassidy Demands Special Prosecutor To Probe VA Abuse There are people that really need to be behind bars or executed over this...

A 90-year-old decorated World War II veteran still fighting to correct what he says is an erroneous war record may finally be getting closer to realizing his goal. Thomas Joseph Smith, Jr., of Glenville, N.Y., who survived some of the bloodiest battles in the Pacific, said he received the shock of a lifetime when he realized military records detailing his time with the U.S. Marine Corps incorrectly indicated he went AWOL for one month during his unit’s deployment on the Marshall Islands in the early 1940s.