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How widespread is the VA rot? — 21 Comments

  1. Well, they saw Shinseki pocketing a lot of goodies from his tenure, so they thought they might as well cut some orders and get some honors too.

  2. So what were you expecting? The SEC couldn’t determine that Bernie Madoff was a crook when they were told he was a crook.

  3. The SEC gets kickbacks from the Enrons and Made off with lots of money people.

    It’s why they had to make an example out of M Stewart. Some low hanging fruit to show the public they had cajones.

  4. The programs to incentivize good performance are almost always open to fraud. Cook the books, back date stock options, re-price stock options, fake programs, hide data, etc. If money can be made through fraudulent activity, someone will figure out how to do it. The bigger and more bureaucratic the organization, the easier it is. One old-fashoined incentive, perform or lose your job, seems to have gone by the wayside, particularly in the government. Market forces aren’t always pretty or stable, but they do a much better job of separating the performers from the deadwood.

    My last Navy active duty assignment was in an organization that received an award as the best unit of its type in the Navy. What a fraud that was. It was a good unit, but made itself exemplary primarily with the help of sharp pencils. That affair was one of the reasons I decided to resign and seek employment with the airlines.

  5. Although many have acknowledged (myself included) that the VA has long been a problem, it seems that is has gone from apathetic incompetence to malfeasance under this administration.

    I offer that the fix is simple:

    Shut down the VA. Put Veterans in the same healthcare program that congress gets. Make sure that Veterans always receive priority over congressmen.

    Congress will insure that a Vet need never again wait for care.

  6. Another thought rising from the VA scandal. Does it bother anyone else but me that federal employees get bonuses? There seems to be something amiss when an employee in the service of the taxpayer (at least theoretically) gets performance bonuses based on bureaucratic standards.

  7. The mess and rot are so deep there’s no cleaning it up. Burn it. Burn Education. Burn Labor. Burn HUD. Burn SBA. Burn, baby, burn.

    Because all the elites do it say they care and congratulate themselves for saying so:

    “Three years ago, First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden started Joining Forces to show their appreciation for the incredible families across America who do so much for our country not just with words, but with real, concrete action.”

    http://www.whitehouse.gov/joiningforces/

    (This is Dr. Biden, the famous Dr. Biden!)

  8. Is the phrase “not just with words” revealing. I mean, why say it. No duh! Is that a type of slip revealing guilt. Or just the opposite. A kind of jab because we all know the real way to change and transformation is with words.

  9. The two shining examples of government health care are the VA and Indian reservations. Some would add active duty military.

  10. T: that’s exactly what I was about to type. In the private sector, bonuses are a way to motivate employees to earn more wealth for the benefit of both themselves and their employers. Nobody’s earning any wealth in the public sector. Who benefits from the bonus besides the public employee? Certainly not the taxpayers or the VA patients.

    As shown in this sorry example, the consequence of decoupling a bonus from the earning of wealth is to turn it into a means of encouraging dishonesty and ass-covering at the expense of competence and efficiency.

  11. Mr. Frank: “Some would add active duty military.”

    I’ve commented on that here in past threads. Battlefield traumas are well taken care of. Sick babies, impacted wisdom teeth, ruptured disks, thyroid problems, etc. not so much.

    I like T’s idea: “Put Veterans in the same healthcare program that congress gets. Make sure that Veterans always receive priority over congressmen.” Capital idea! Am not holding my breath until it happens.

  12. This scandal is merely an echo of NHS scandals in Britain.

    It’s the NORM for single payer systems.

    The dynamic always changes from…
    attending patients to…
    attending to problems.

    You have invariant pay checks, awards, prestige…

    In effect 100% taxation of marginal effort.

    &&&

    And then, this is a system that gets to bury its mistakes.

    You wouldn’t even want to look at what’s up with the Indian Nations on the reservations.

  13. Americans talked about how Hussein wasn’t using his own ObamaCare law, including Congress.

    The hypocrisy doesn’t bother them, because they refuse to give their limited medical supplies and doctors to the children of veterans. They merely wish the veterans and their families to die off. That way, more medicine left for the DC regime’s kids.

  14. How wide? Wider than the deep blue sea. Wider than the journey to the moon.

  15. All this endless fiddling with/twisting/lying about statistics has been previewed in the British Parliament’s endless bun-fights about the National Health Service’s record of care (i.e., lack of). Whichever party is in power spends most of its time defending the NHS’s record on their watch, but nothing ever changes (cf. the Staffordshire hospital scandal — thousands dead).

    Just watch the Prime Minister’s Question Time on CSpan, and you’ll see what our future holds. Horrible.

  16. What we’re seeing is the transformation of medicine into a democrat jobs program. Just like government run education. Never mind they’re increasingly run by horribly incompetent people, because everybody will have insurance and all kids will go to school!

    Who’s against healthcare and education?

  17. One of my sources say that the VA has their own union.

    Roll the drums please. Unions are the hand maidens of obedience for the LA.

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