WASHINGTON — The scandal that has exploded in the government’s veterans hospitals runs a lot deeper than the issue of long waits for those seeking medical care.
And it’s been going on for a great deal longer, too, as a mountain of Government Accountability Office (GAO) audits can attest over many decades: countless reports of medical mistreatment; dangerously lengthy delays for ill veterans seeking care; shocking mortality rates when compared with private-sector hospitals for similar surgeries; old, rundown facilities; and aged, broken medical equipment.
These and other problems in the Department of Veterans Affairs’ vast bureaucracy have been exposed in a sea of reports now gathering dust in congressional oversight committees that have failed to effectively address their findings.
Lawmakers at Senate hearings last week were beating their breasts over reports of veterans facing long treatment delays that have resulted in numerous deaths. We still do not know how many, because of recent stories that the real numbers have been covered up.
Still, the fact remains that Congress has not done its job to see that VA programs, staffing, facilities and equipment are adequately funded and reforms enacted across the entire VA landscape. It’s been asleep at the switch.
Nor has the Obama administration done anywhere near the due diligence needed to see that VA has the resources to adequately care for the thousands of soldiers returning home from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
But the tragedy of this latest VA scandal is that we keep making the same mistakes over and over again, and never learn from them.
Let’s go back seven years ago when Washington Post reporters — after exposing shockingly shabby, unhealthy conditions at Walter Reed Hospital — found many of the same problems existed throughout the VA’s organization.