The Department of Veterans Affairs is under fire again, this time in Los Angeles. A shocking new report by the VA inspector shows that 43% of the 225 vets who died during the time frame between October 2014 – August 2015 were either waiting for an appointment or waiting for a medical test they never received.
The findings come just nearly three years after the VA scandal of 2014, when reports revealed that least 35 veterans died while waiting for medical service from the VA facility in Phoenix.
At the time, President Obama’s Secretary of Veterans Affairs resigned out of humiliation and promised an overhaul of the system. That never happened.
“In January [2017], The U.S. Office of Special Counsel sent its own investigative findings to the White House and Congress, saying the Phoenix VA continues to struggle with significant patient wait times,” reports Fox News.
Shockingly, the 2017 scandal in Los Angeles may be much worse than the Phoenix 2014 scandal.
“The number of patients waiting for care, the deletion of consults, and the wait list were much more significant here than at Phoenix,” Dr. Christian Head, surgeon at the Los Angeles VA, told CBS News. “I first noticed an unusual number of patients who are presenting with delay in diagnosis, meaning that they present into the system, they disappeared for a number of years and then they presented late with advanced cancers. Those consults were being deleted, literally removed from the system.”
Head added that 140,000 patient consults were intentionally deleted by VA administrators and staff.
After years of neglect under the Obama administration, President Trump has vowed to fix the system and protect American veterans from corrupt bureaucrats and government administrators.
Last week, the president signed a bill granting senior leaders at the Department of Veteran Affairs more leeway to not only fire inefficient and incompetent employees but to protect whistleblowers who blow the lid off of corruption.
But even as the White House works to protect those who have bled for this country from the callous indifference and ineffectiveness of government-run services, Democrats on the Hill have launched an all-out propaganda war to demonize the GOP’s push for Obamacare reform. As vets spend months dying slow deaths waiting for medical services from negligently-run, dangerously incompetent government agencies, Democrats actually have the audacity to push for further centralization of health care and more government control of our medical needs.