VA Scandal Gets Even Worse, Again

CNN has an exclusive on the Veterans Administration scandal. The cover-up of mistreatment of veterans is still ongoing.

Records of dead veterans were changed or physically altered, some even in recent weeks, to hide how many people died while waiting for care at the Phoenix VA hospital, a whistle-blower told CNN in stunning revelations that point to a new coverup in the ongoing VA scandal.

“Deceased” notes on files were removed to make statistics look better, so veterans would not be counted as having died while waiting for care, Pauline DeWenter said.

DeWenter should know. DeWenter is the actual scheduling clerk at the Phoenix VA who said for the better part of a year she was ordered by supervisors to manage and handle the so-called “secret waiting list,” where veterans’ names of those seeking medical care were often placed, sometimes left for months with no care at all.

DeWenter should get 24/7 security.

It was one of DeWenter’s roles to call veterans when appointments became available to schedule them to get a consultation. Sometimes when she made those calls, she’d find that the veteran had died, so she would enter that on their records.

But at least seven times since last October, records that showed that veterans died while waiting for care — records which DeWenter personally handled and had entered in details of veterans’ deaths — were physically altered, or written over, by someone else, DeWenter said in an exclusive interview with CNN. The changes, or re-writes, listed the veterans as living, not deceased, essentially hiding their deaths.

The alterations had even occurred in recent weeks, she said, in a deliberate attempt to try to hide just how many veterans died while waiting for care, by trying to pretend dead veterans remain alive.

There’s more.

Beginning early last year, DeWenter said she was also instructed to hide the crisis at the Phoenix VA medical center by concealing new requests for treatment. This was at a time when the VA was paying bonuses to senior staff whose facilities met the goals of providing care in a timely manner for veterans, typically within 14 days.

New requests by veterans wanting treatment were actually stuffed into a drawer, to make the books look better, according to DeWenter.

Asked what happened to the new requests for appointments, DeWenter said: “They went into a desk drawer…. That would be the secret list.”

There was “no doubt” it was, in fact, a secret list, she said.

More at the link.

Every liberal, and that includes Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who wants a single-payer healthcare system should be asked if any of this has caused any change in their thinking. It probably hasn’t.