This week marks the anniversary of a great awakening in America about the mistreatment of the nation’s veterans.
One year ago it was first revealed that officials from the Department of Veterans Affairs in Phoenix had been systematically manipulating their agency’s computer systems to conceal ridiculously long waiting times for veterans to receive care. Some veterans died waiting for treatment.
The scandal grew as it became clear that this and other highly unethical practices were commonplace at VA facilities all over America. Each new revelation — including the VA’s attempts early on to kill the story by pretending to fire a few officials on the verge of retirement — has added to the case that the VA bureaucracy lacks both integrity and a sense of commitment to serve those who had served this nation.
The end result of all this was the sacking of Veterans’ Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki. But it should be abundantly clear by now that this decapitation was only the beginning of the solution.
The new VA Secretary, Robert McDonald, has begun a period of self-searching and investigation within the department. Unfortunately, he seems to be choosing his investigators from the very same corrupt and self-protecting pool of bureaucrats that have caused the VA’s many problems.
Case in point: One current investigation pertains to a VA facility where veterans were doped up with opiates and given no treatment for their underlying conditions. It is good to see this rock turned over, but among those McDonald has appointed to the investigating board is Deborah Amdur, director of the White River Junction Veterans Affairs hospital in Vermont. Amdur was just recently caught in a lie answering questions about a terrible scandal at her own facility.
Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., in the course of helping a constituent, asked Amdur a very specific question earlier this year — whether her facility had prescribed a tainted drug to a New Hampshire veteran that caused him severe injury in 2009, and then attempted to conceal this error for five years.
Amdur denied both allegations. But as the Washington Examiner‘s Luke Rosiak reported this month, both were absolutely true. And in fact, Amdur had seen evidence that they were true before she gave her answer to Ayotte.
The veteran in question, Ted Stachulski, suffered a seizure as a result of the tainted medicine he received. He then had to fight the VA bureaucracy for five years to receive documentation on his own treatment, which by law he was entitled to within 20 days. At one point, VA employees cooked up a false medical document for Stachulski to prove that he had not been given a bad drug.
When the correct documentation was finally released, it showed that Stachulski had been issued a contaminated batch of the drug bupropion, even though the VA had been aware for at least one month earlier that there was a contamination problem with specific batches of bupropion.
Amdur told Sen. Ayotte that there had been no contaminated prescription and no cover-up. The records demonstrate that this was false, and that she had access to records showing it was false. Yet now Amdur has been appointed to investigate another problem at another VA facility.
If the Department of Veterans Affairs is serious about cleaning up its own affairs, it should not put liars in charge of investigating its own shortcomings.
