05/26/14 – Kelley B. Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
It's Memorial Day 2014.
And...
Well, it doesn't matter that I'm on the air, I couldn't be out in this weather anyway.
I've got a Texas storm outside the window there.
My dog is terrified.
But anyway, I hope the weather is nice and you guys are having a nice time wherever you are today.
Thanks for joining us on the show on a holiday here.
To mark this Memorial Day, perfect timing really here.
We've got the great Kelly Vlahos from the American Conservative Magazine and antiwar.com on her great new article, terrible new article, Memorial Day Nightmare, as scandal sweeps the VA.
Real reform will come from institutional transformation, not more number games.
Again, that's Kelly Vlahos at theamericanconservative.com and I think this one will be running in the print issue.
And you can find the link today at antiwar.com in the viewpoints and in the top news section today.
And this is a really important and a very well done article and I really hope that you'll look at it, pass it around, especially show it to right wing warmonger type friends of yours because it's in the American Conservative and everything.
And so maybe they want to spin this as just an Obama crisis, but that'd be okay too.
You know, why not?
I don't know.
Welcome to the show, Kelly.
How are you?
Great.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
I really appreciate it.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us today and especially taking time out and bearing with me as I screw up all the time zones and everything here.
But this article is such an important piece of work here.
And honestly, I saw when the story first broke and then I had missed the developments.
But I guess just catch us up on the facts of the case here if you could, please.
Sure.
Well, it all started, CNN had done an investigative piece in late April about the Phoenix VA system in which they alleged that there were 40 veterans who had died waiting for care and that there were upwards of 1,600 patients there who have been waiting for care.
They interviewed family members who had said that they had issues, their veteran had issues ranging from, you know, early stages of cancer, very serious breathing issues, heart problems, who could not get an appointment for months on end.
They found that these patients had been put on what we're calling a secret waiting list in which their long wait times were not showing up on the system's electronic records.
So what happened was when until there was an appointment for these veterans, they didn't show up on the official system or network that, you know, that they're being watched by their federal overseers.
So by all official standards, it looked like Phoenix was just pushing veterans through on time within 14-day windows, which is the guidance that President Obama had initiated a year or two ago when the backlog scandal erupted.
Well, what they were doing was taking all of these poor veterans and putting them off the books, so to speak, just to make their own books look better.
And it turned out they weren't the only hospital that was doing this.
Let me stop you there for just a second before we get to the further developments from there, but I just want to make sure I understand.
Did I understand it was implicit in what you said that they were getting appointments, but they weren't getting put into the system until appointment day or something like that, and that was how they were skewing the numbers?
Yeah, so until the appointments would come available within a 14-day window, then their names and their requests for care were put into this public system.
I mean, public meaning this was the system that, you know, was accessed by all administrators.
This was the system that they showed Washington to prove that they were working successfully on the backlog.
But until that point, they were sort of put off the books.
So you have these veterans who have been waiting for months for care on these quote-unquote secret lists.
So then anybody on the secret list, they're waiting longer than they would be if they had to admit that these people existed up until the point that they can finally get them in.
Is that it?
Yeah, well, I just think that they had such a backlog.
And in the Phoenix case, they said there were 1,600 veterans that had been waiting for care.
So there was such a backlog that, you know, in fear of being called out or being penalized by the inspector general or the federal oversight, you know, that was in charge of keeping these backlogs in check, they just took it off the books.
I don't know if it caused, you know, more veterans to have more wait time.
Well, you mentioned Thomas Breen in here.
He waited more than two months for an appointment.
And then it turned out that, yeah, he died of stage four metastasized cancer.
Maybe they wouldn't have been able to treat him at all, but we'll never know.
And where else in America does anyone ever have to wait for two months for an appointment?
It's absolutely abhorrent.
It's just outrageous.
I know that, you know, the Phoenix system has been pretty adamant that they were taking care of veterans in a timely fashion and that they wouldn't let these veterans die and that they are conducting their own investigation.
And I think that they found so far that 17 veterans have died, but they won't say whether it was connected to their wait times or not.
The VA itself has done its own investigation over across all of its systems and found that 23 veterans that were on wait lists had died over the last year.
So I don't have the study right, you know, in front of me.
But, you know, what I believe here, because of the subsequent reports, finding that at least I think it's eight or nine other systems have, whistleblowers have come forward to say, yes, we have secret lists going on in our system.
I, you know, I believe that the VA has been aware that this has been going on, and I believe it's probably a much bigger scandal or problem than we're even getting a hint of at this point.
At this, I think at this juncture, it's a matter of the whistleblowers coming forward and saying this is happening at my VA.
And now how many different whistleblowers do we have at this point?
Because as you said, this story only broke, what, a month ago?
Yeah, it only broke a month ago.
And yeah, and I would say in total there are nine systems that we're dealing with here, nine facilities.
Is that nine different whistleblowers or a few less than that?
I don't know if it's nine different whistleblowers, but you have whistleblowers in each of these states.
So they had came forward and some of them said, you know, we already have an investigation going on in my system.
It's just that it had been very quiet.
And so it turns out that this secret list issue is not new.
And we even have a memo that indicates that the feds in Washington at the VA there already knew in 2010 that there was a secret list problem going on.
So it kind of lays bare this assertion by General, I mean, well, Secretary, former General Shinseki that Phoenix was an isolated incident.
It's clearly not an isolated incident.
But this tells me, and which should for all your listeners, is that, you know, under the pressure of trying to get this, you know, one million backlog down, these systems have put a hell of a lot of more energy into covering up the fact that they're not caring for veterans at an efficient pace than they are for caring for the veterans.
And I don't want to disparage everyone that works at VA's because I know that there are many, many good doctors and officials at these places, at these facilities that are really earnest and trying to do the right thing.
But I think the pressure to get these backlogs down have caused people to try to take obvious shortcuts to save their fannies.
And now they've been caught.
I'm sorry, we've got to hold it right there and take this break, Kelly.
But we'll be right back, everybody, with the great Kelly Vlahos from the AmericanConservative.com Memorial Day Nightmare on the VA scandal.
Hey, Al Scott here.
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And thanks.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the thing here, man.
I haven't had breaks in a long time.
All right, I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, the Scott Horton Show.
And I'm so lucky I got Kelly Vallejos on the phone.
She's got this great article for Memorial Day.
I'll tell you what, it is a nightmare.
MemorialDayNightmare at TheAmericanConservative.com.
You can find it in the top news section and in the viewpoint section today at AntiWar.com.
Do your part to make this thing viral over there on Facebook and Twitter and what have you, would you?
This is really important, what's going on here.
So many different lessons to be learned.
But it seems to me the most glaring thing here, and this is sort of just my imagination in a way, right?
But it sounds to me, Kelly, like just the ultimate Milgram experiment here or one of those weirdo things where you try out just what evil you can get people to do under the color of authority.
Give them a white lab coat, give them a little shiny costume jewelry for their lapel, and then all of a sudden they can order you to do any horrible thing.
So think of all the, I don't know, the little old ladies, the proverbial little old ladies that work at the VA who give each other knowing looks about, geez, what a horrible thing we're in the middle of doing right now as they keep doing it all across the country, putting them on a secret list when any one of them knows it's wrong.
And none of them will go ahead and speak up until, I guess, I'm happy to say as you report here, after one spoke up, a lot of people started coming forward about this.
But just how could it have gotten to this point?
The incentives for the people who show up every day and allow this to go on without calling James Risen or Kelly Blejos.
It's just, it ain't right, man.
How does this happen?
We're talking about every single one of these people is a grown adult over 18, most of them with advanced degrees here, these doctors and things like this, right?
I mean, it's madness.
Well, I mean, you know, this has been going on for 10 years.
I mean, the whole idea of these backlogs, you know, we started hearing about them as early as 2007.
So the backlogs have been growing and growing and growing, and this is one of the things that happens when you send 2 million men and women into war for 10 years.
They're going to come home and they're going to start accessing these services almost immediately.
So you have about a million veterans who are now accessing or have filed claims to access Veterans Administration services.
So you have this huge deluge of veterans coming into the system, and you don't have the capacity to take care of it.
And even though the VA had been warned, you know, as far back as 2001, when they started sending troops to Afghanistan, they did not prepare adequately.
Why?
Because it is a massive bureaucracy that had already been riddled with failure and corruption for years, dating back to Vietnam days, and they never fixed themselves.
And so when you have a sick bureaucracy that's rotting from the inside, and I'm talking about, you know, the issues of bloat, of cover your ass, of little fiefdoms going on, all of the issues that go with these, you know, Byzantine labyrinths of bureaucracy, when the rubber hits the road, so to speak, they're not capable of taking care of their chief customer, which is the veteran.
And part of that, too, is the meta lie of the entire terror war is this is going to be easy.
We're the baddest badasses ever, and these guys are cavemen, and come on, guys, let's go kill them all and this and that.
But no, it turns out it's actually horrible for the people who are killing them all because the all is a bunch of civilian residents of Kandahar, people who don't deserve killing at all.
They come back feeling so guilty they want to blow their own brains out over what they let their government convince them to do.
Well, and you brought up a good point, because politically, this bureaucracy was incapable of marshalling all of its resources because American people were told that we weren't going to be seeing a lot of casualties.
You know, so there was never a real prudent marshalling of the resources to prepare for massive casualties coming in, for multi-trauma like we've been seeing, for the PTSD that we're seeing, because politically, you know, they had to put on a happy face.
So there's a lot of the politics.
We're seeing the outgrowth of the politics that were going on 10 years ago.
But, you know, to get back, so you have 10 years of backlog, and now these administrators at these facilities are being told by Washington, you need to clear up this backlog now because we need to save face, you know, to Congress and the American people.
And they're finding, well, they can't do it as fast as they're expected to.
And all of a sudden they go into CYA mode.
You know, I got to save my job.
I got to, you know, and they'll do anything to save their job.
And I think that's what you're seeing now.
But, you know, until CNN broke the story, it was like, you know, the mainstream media had only been nibbling at the edges of this veterans crisis.
Right.
And it just goes to show you, you know, when a mainstream corporate news organization comes in and says 40 people have died waiting for care, and all of a sudden all of Congress is paying attention, all of the mass media is paying attention.
You know, the president is paying attention.
They're calling for Shinseki to step down.
But good journalists and people have been doing these stories for, you know, several years now about the care at the VA.
And, you know, I'm happy that CNN broke the story and that finally it's getting the attention it's due.
But to say this is a crisis that came out of nowhere would be, you know, really stupid and remiss because it's been going on and it goes much further than wait lists.
As you know, there's a lot of things going on.
It's the denial of the injuries more than anything.
Denial of the injuries.
You know, there's this case in St. Louis that the Center for Investigative Journalism did, in which they have, you know, mental health counselors actually doing the very minimum in terms of seeing patients every day.
And this whistleblower couldn't take it anymore.
And he said, listen, we have all these mental health counselors here.
We have all these psychiatrists here.
What is it?
Because when you're talking about psychiatrists who work at the VA, they're getting paid.
They're showing up in the morning.
And these are serious professional people to be an actual credentialed psychiatrist.
So it can't be that they just don't care to do their job there.
There has to be, in fact, like a negative incentive that makes them need to lean the other way rather than working overtime.
In fact, just sit and twiddle their thumbs.
What is going on?
You know, I don't know.
And that's that's my short answer.
I mean, I know the problem is it's so easy to imagine being in these people's same position.
Give me Eric Shinseki's job.
And of course, the first order of business for all of my little right hand men, Smithers is whose job it is to carry out my will is to go and turn every part of this thing upside down.
Map out who's everybody, who's everybody's enemies, who's doing what wrong thing.
Audit the hell out of all of the books and all of the numbers and figure out what's really going on here and make sure, if only because of how stuck up I am, that I don't end up getting nailed to the wall for some World War II vet dying on a secret list out there somewhere.
That you know what I mean?
Like, even if I was Shinseki, if I wasn't me, but I was him, why wouldn't I do everything I could to prevent this kind of thing from happening to me?
You know, I just don't understand it.
It's like they don't care at all.
But why not?
Yeah.
It's like they got a printing press.
It's not like they can't afford it.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I guess we're just lucky that there are whistleblowers like in that St. Louis case.
You know, he came forward.
He said, listen, I was demoted when I came forward to my direct superiors and said, you know, my fellow doctors are doing the minimal in terms of helping these vets who are suffering from psychological problems.
And he got demoted.
So he went to the press.
And now, you know, now there's a huge investigation in St. Louis, which, of course, you know, officials deny his charges.
But I think that we are lucky that there are people in each of these systems who are willing to risk their careers.
And you and I have talked about this before.
And I know that the Project for Government Oversight has teamed up with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, and they've basically developed a Web page, and they've invited, you know, whistleblowers to come in.
They promised to give them cover.
You know, I'm sure there's plenty of, you know, legal people who are ready to take whistleblowers under their wings.
So maybe because we're in a new era now that whistleblowing is being more, it's more of a protected and respected, you know, way of getting the public, you know, scrutiny on these issues.
You know, maybe this is the start of something bigger.
I don't know, Scott.
I mean, I hope, I believe that the more brave people that will come forward, the more that Washington will be forced to take action.
Like, Shinseki will have to fire people at this point.
Right, and maybe himself.
I sure hope so.
Hey, listen, thank you so much for your great journalism and your time as always.
I sure appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
That's the great Kelly Vlahos, everybody.
Memorial Day nightmare about the VA scandal at theamericanconservative.com.
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