Warning: How the VA ‘Red-Flags’ Patriots
A Commentary By Michelle Malkin
FTA:
I first reported on the VA’s secretive database on “disgruntled” and “disruptive” vets five years ago. Under the VA policy on “patient record flags,” federal bureaucrats can classify vets as “threats” based on assessments of their “difficult,” “annoying” and “noncompliant” behavior. The VA manual says the flags “are used to alert Veterans Health Administration medical staff and employees of patients whose behavior and characteristics may pose a threat either to their safety, the safety of other patients, or compromise the delivery of quality health care.”
What a crock. It’s precisely because so many vets receive inferior care from the feds that they have been forced to raise their voices. Have we all forgotten the 40 veterans who perished at the Phoenix, Arizona VA, which relegated patients to a bureaucratic black hole through secret waiting lists? Among examples of patients’ behavior referred to the red-flaggers in the VA’s “Disruptive Behavior Committees” (Orwell couldn’t have cooked up a better name): venting “frustration about VA services and/or wait times, threatening lawsuits or to have people fired, and frequent unwarranted visits to the emergency department or telephone calls to facility staff.”
Disabled Air Force veteran and veterans advocate/attorney Benjamin Krause has exposed the Soviet-style targeting of veterans flagged for exercising their First Amendment rights or threatening to sue the VA over neglectful care or for simply being too “expensive.” He calls it “straight out of a totalitarian regime.” In 2013, the VA inspector general concluded that the bureaucracy “does not have a comprehensive definition of what constitutes disruptive behavior.” In January 2018, a VA Office of Inspector General report found that large numbers of flagged veterans were being left in the dark about being placed on dangerous patient lists — with no recourse to remove phony flags or appeal in any meaningful way.
Despite rules requiring the “Disruptive Behavior Committee” to notify flagged patients of their status and informing them of their right to amend their reports, the OIG found no evidence in 49% of electronic health records that the panels had provided such notice and disclosure.
In 25% of medical records reviewed, the OIG “found no evidence that patients were informed they had the right to request to amend or appeal” special orders restricting care of flagged patients.
There are undoubtedly patients in the system who may pose real threats. But the “problem with the process is that it is secret,” Krause explains at DisabledVeterans.org. “The review process is done in secret and the veteran will not know who sat on the committee or what the evidence presented was prior to the decision. Only after the decision is made are veterans informed of the outcome and given a chance to appeal the vague allegations. That seems like a due process violation if I have ever seen one.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/left-reflex-toward-illiberal-democracy/
The Reflex toward Illiberal Democracy
By Kevin D. Williamson
FTA:
There’s always an emergency, it seems, to justify the Left’s rush to tyranny.
There are two rules for illiberal democracy.
The first rule is that during an emergency certain illiberal and anti-democratic measures are necessary to ensure public safety, national security, and the practice of democracy itself.
The second rule is that there is always an emergency.
With the horrifying massacres in El Paso and Dayton, political entrepreneurs already are taking recourse to the tenets of illiberal democracy. But because this is the United States, and the most powerful nation in the world is governed by criminals, miscreants, and morons, illiberal democracy is not the scoundrels’ last recourse — it is their first recourse.
Cory Booker, trafficker in absurd racial conspiracy theories, is a great practitioner of illiberal democracy. In response to the shootings over the weekend, he demanded that . . . Republican campaign rallies be canceled as a public-safety measure. President Donald Trump’s rallies, he insists without anything that might plausibly be described as evidence, “inspire white nationalist attacks like the one in El Paso on Saturday.” Somehow, the pursuit of public safety always ends up disadvantaging the other party’s political efforts. One might be forgiven for failing to take Senator Booker seriously, for this and for many other reasons.
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Others have called for gutting the Bill of Rights and trampling on due process, empowering government to curtail, suspend, or revoke the civil rights of Americans who have not been arrested or charged with any crime, much less convicted of one.
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Democrats would impose licensing on political criticism in the guise of “campaign finance reform” and would prohibit the communication of certain unpopular ideas as “hate speech.” Progressives have argued for jailing people holding dissenting views on climate change, and Democratic prosecutors have in fact investigated companies and political advocates on precisely those grounds. Some elements of the Left, such as Antifa, have openly embraced violence as a means of suppressing unpopular political speech, but Senator Booker’s more polite model is more common and, if anything, more insidious.