Is Shinseki Fired Yet? How About Congress?

I can't see any way for Obama to keep Eric Shinseki on as Secretary of Veterans Affairs. No matter how good a job he did fighting in Vietnam or commanding in Bosnia or as Army Chief of Staff, he screwed up royally as Secretary of Veterans Affairs. At least 40 veterans have died while waiting to see V.A. doctors. That's not what Americans expect from the Veterans Administration and Shinseki should resign at once or be fired by Obama. There seemed to be a bureaucratic conspiracy to hide statistics that would make things "look" better for those involved with oversight-- while doing nothing to help veterans.

Chalk it up to lazy leadership via an over-reliance on numbers and record-keeping. Instead of managing patients, Secretary Shinseki’s administration was managing numbers. And in this case, it caused people to die.

When those long wait times were previously reported, the President publicly admitted to being appalled and told Secretary Shinseki to do something. The Secretary then declared a standard of no more than 125 days from incident to care had to be met. And he told employees of the VA to meet that goal, or they risked losing their jobs.

As a leader, Secretary Shinseki didn’t offer a solution. He didn’t challenge his staff to find out the root cause of the problem and understand why these waits were so long. He didn’t hire outside consultants to evaluate the problem and propose solutions. He didn’t ask for “best practices” from industry.

Instead, he pushed out a metric and a tracking system and threatened his team with pay cuts (or at least no bonuses,) demotions, career ending reviews and potentially termination.  “Solve the problem, or else.” Then he was back to his office, and waiting for the “right” statistics to show up so he could say “all is well Mr. President.”

Such leadership becomes a breeding ground for collusion, corruption and malfeasance as people try to save their income, careers and their jobs. If the order is to “make that number” then a way will be found to “make that number.” The command wasn’t to save lives, or improve care. The order was to reach a certain metric.  So out comes all the creativity imaginable to give the boss what he wants. And in this case it involved deception in record keeping, dual bookkeeping, hiding information, falsifying reports and even letting people die in order to give the Secretary the numbers he ordered them to report.

Meanwhile, the Secretary is so involved in managing his own career-- and that of his boss-- that he simply turned a blind eye to all other data. The American Legion was offering compelling statistics that things weren’t as the Secretary said. And there were multiple stories coming up in the press, and through the veteran networks, of patient experiences which did not match what the Secretary reported. But instead of listening to external information the Secretary ignored all of it and kept pushing his own organization to give him the numbers he wanted.

The Republicans think they sniff an opportunity to privatize the V.A., for them, a dream come true. Conservatives pay lip service to getting veterans health care but they refuse to pay for it and the Republicans in Congress systematically underfunded veterans benefits just as a flood of veterans came home from overseas. On top of that, right now, by refusing to close the Medicaid gap, Republicans are denying more than a quarter of a million vets healthcare. This year, hundreds of them will die before their time as a result. But if Obama thinks Democrats are going to go easy on his administration for this mess, he's mistaken. This morning,for example, Rick Weiland, the populist Democrat running for the open South Dakota Senate seat, called on Shinseki to resign-- and that was just the beginning. "A single scalp is not nearly enough," he said angrily.

"Taking off the head at the top is completely useless unless the culture of incredible indifference toward the real needs of our veterans that exists in the United States Congress is changed starting today," Weiland said. Everyone in Congress is pointing self-righteous fingers at Shinseki and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). What Congress needs is a mirror because it’s their total financial indifference to the needs of our veterans that causes atrocities like the VA's failure to provide care on a timely basis."

"When you keep under funding the VA, and ignoring the pleas of veterans, what do you expect at the top of the VA, a bunch of hard charging animals determined to provide the best possible care for our wounded warriors, or a lazy, lethargic bureaucracy that senses you don't care and acts accordingly," he continued.

"I call today for the resignation of Secretary Shinseki. But anyone who does not understand that it is the penny pinching stupidity and arrogance of the ‘shut it down’ politicians in Congress that is the real problem is either blind or willfully ignorant. I've been to 400 towns across South Dakota now, and I challenge anyone to find a single veteran in any one of those towns who thinks the VA leadership in Washington is a well-run, properly funded organization. Veterans get out there today and demand more than Secretary Shinseki's scalp. Demand that Congress stop pretending their refusal to properly fund the VA, while they hypocritically continue to allow billionaires to avoid paying the taxes that would make funding the VA possible, is not the real problem. Make them put their money where their patriotic mouths are, or the next VA Secretary, and the entire VA bureaucracy, will be just like the old one-- uncaring, underfunded, and unable to help the men and women who above all other Americans most deserve their help."