Terrell County Vietnam veteran's treatment indicative of VA scandal
Concerned that he was still passing out and suffering through panic attacks despite treatment at the Veterans Administration clinic in Dublin, Vietnam veteran Neil Thompson decided to make an appointment with a non-VA-affiliated endocrinologist.
“When he saw all the medication I was on, the first thing he told me was to throw out all the pills I’d been prescribed from doctors at the VA clinic,” Thompson, a retired insurance executive who now lives in Terrell County, said. “I was up to taking 30 pills a day. He reduced it to four, and I’ve been doing much better since he treated me.
Should the VA Have to Answer for Abandoning US Veterans?
Americans want to believe that the U.S. government does everything it can to take care of and support its veterans. However, the government actively sought to prevent Vietnam veterans from getting the care they desperately needed and deserved.
For decades, the VA refused to acknowledge that anyone could have been harmed by military herbicides, like Agent Orange, used during the Vietnam War. It willfully ignored any and all evidence of that harm and then conducted its own research to prove these chemicals were safe—research that was intentionally flawed and that is largely disregarded today.
"They pull all the back-of-the-line guys to front, but they stole from Peter to pay Paul, and these veterans have been abandoned again," Bergmann said. "They're dying while they're waiting."
The time it takes the agency to handle claims or treat patients at its hospitals has come under more intense scrutiny following the reports that some veterans died while awaiting care at VA hospitals and that some hospital administrators altered documents to make the delays look shorter than they really were.
The news agency, WSB-TV 2, received data from VA from 2002-2013 through a Freedom of Information Act request. The data listed the payouts from VA for tort claims that resulted in death and related harms. According to the Daily News, 1,194 veteran deaths are linked to delays in health care delivery. The database lists the amount of the payouts by each VA facility. It also lists to type of negligence claimed in the tort. Here is the result of my nationwide search for payouts from “Failure to Perform Procedure.”
The failures of the Veterans Affairs Department are a moral abomination: They leave soldiers wounded at war to wait in long lines for the payments they need to fund their care.
And VA failures are under new scrutiny amid reports of a string of preventable deaths among veterans and a growing political controversy around them—and many in Congress are pointing a finger in the White House's direction.
As a crisis engulfs the Department of Veterans Affairs over allegations of wrongdoing at VA medical centers across the country, Miami’s VA Hospital has come under fire from one of its own: a longtime employee and police detective, who alleges that some patients are dealing drugs, others are being physically abused — and administrators are covering up the problems.
Thomas Fiore, a VA law enforcement officer who was reassigned to clerical duties in February, said he has repeatedly reported to superiors incidents of drug dealing among patients, evidence of physical abuse of patients and other potential crimes.
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