Shinseki won’t step down
Stars & Stripes reports that Ric Shinseki, the Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs, has announced that he won’t step down from the post, despite the fact that agency’s inability to service the population that it services is a national punchline.
[Shinseki] acknowledged he has work to do to rebuild the confidence of veterans.
Yeah, wave because that ship has sailed, Ric. Like the American legion commander said (from an Army Times article sent by Chief Tango)
But Dellinger said recent problems have changed the perspective of Legion officials toward Shinseki. He cited multiple recent scandals involving preventable patient deaths, controversy over executive bonuses, and a concern among Legion members that VA services are on the decline.
“Our veterans need to know that the VA health-care system is a safe place where they can receive treatment and feel assured that patient safety is a top priority,” he said. “Errors and lapses can occur in any system. But The American Legion expects when such errors and lapses are discovered, that they are dealt with swiftly and that the responsible parties are held accountable.
“This has not happened at the Department of Veterans Affairs. There needs to be a change, and that change needs to occur at the top.”
Republican Senators are calling for Shinseki to resign now;
“He needs to step down,” [Texas Senator John Cornyn] told reporters. “The president needs to find a new leader to lead this organization out of the wilderness, and back to providing the service our veterans deserve.”
In a Senate speech earlier in the day, [Kansas Senator Jerry Moran] said Shinseki seemed unwilling or unable to fix the department’s problems.
“Veterans are waiting for action and yet the VA continues to operate in the same old bureaucratic fashion, settling for mediocrity and continued disservice to our nation’s heroes,” Moran said. “There’s a difference in wanting change and leading it to happen.”
There’s no confidence to rebuild, Shinseki. Pack your bags. The American Legion’s call for his resignation was the final nail. I’ve said since the day he was nominated for the post that he is an incompetent boob, but even I didn’t realize the heights (or depths) of incompetent boobery he was able to reach. But everyone said that he’s a wounded veteran so he would know how to treat us – incompetent boobs might want to help, but they can’t help being incompetent boobs. Serious.
Category: Veterans' Affairs Department
“The leader is responsible for everything the unit does or fails to do.” – FM 7-8
I am shocked, shocked that Shinseki refuses to step down.
Hondo…I will take that comment as tongue in cheek. Why should he? Good paying job with bonuses. What’s the worst that could happen to him, the POTUS does a lateral reassignment into the EPA or some other gub’ment agency, same pay, same benefits.
(Here’s my tongue in cheek) Apparently Shinseki takes pride in his accomplishments and his confident ability to turn things around and by God, he wants the chance to prove himself to veterans and the American people that things will be better!
At this point, it would seem to me that the VSO’s need to lead the demand for his resignation. A concerted effort by the combined memberships and staffs of the Legion, VFW, DAV, etc, and using the media as much and as often as possible.
Make up News Releases with official statements. make veterans who use the VA available for comment. Get those to every newspaper, radio station, TV station and blog no matter how small the market might be.
Make Shinseki as uncomfortable as possible. It’s the only way that he’s ever going to leave.
Tim, I have to disagree. All that would work if he had any self respect or felt responsible for any of this. He absolutely doesn’t. You can’t shame a man out of office who thinks he’s bigger then the office and more important then the people he’s supposed to be serving.
Honestly, it is not just him. Top to bottom at the VA needs to be cleaned up. You have career GS employees who have moved up the ladder over the past couple decades, whose only qualifications are that they were someone else’s headache and were promoted up and out instead of being fired…
Malingering, fraud, incompetence; these are but a few of the VA’s “core values”. management sucks ass, the Unions protect everyone even the most deserving of being fired. Waste, duplication of effort, employees who just sit on their work doing the very bare minimal if even that…
Meantime veterans Claims sit collecting dust, their healthcare at some VAMC’s is subpar. There is zero uniformity from one hospital to the next when it comes to administration and SOP’s. NO ONE KNOWS what anyone else does, or where to go to get an answer. “I don’t know” or worse, “not my job”.
VA is sending out Teams to physically tour each and every VAMC, and select community based outpatient care facilities beginning next week to assess patient access to care. In other words, they will be looking to see how many more locations have similar situations as occurred in Arizona.
Shutting the barn door after the horses got out…I am hoping though that they do in depth examinations of the manner in which patients are scheduled for appointments.
But by announcing this move, the VA has lost the element of surprise, giving the individual VAMCs time to dump, erase and destroy any evidence of wrong doing. I expect to read that nothing will be found and everything is just peachy in VA-Land.
With no fanfare, these teams should just show up and start going through the facility’s admin section with a fine tooth comb.
I agree in part,but that was never going to happen… surprise that is. Not in the government when it comes to an agency investigating itself.
Can’t say I have any real complaints about the VA’s medical care system. What small amount of care I’ve received thru them has been decent. Same is true of loans and educational bennies.
The rating side, however . . . well, that varies between a high end of “so-so” and a low end of “as screwed up as a football bat”. Ditto the compensation side.
I seriously wonder if it isn’t time to split the DVA into 4 independent agencies, no two of which work for the same guy: medical care, disability ratings, compensation/pension, and other financial. Those four categories of activity seem to me at best loosely connected (and in some cases, wholly disconnected from one another). And their missions and goals are very different from one another – and sometimes IMO conflict.
VA is already divided by function. Veterans Health Care, benefits, and Cemetery.
I do not see how breaking it down any further would solve much, if anything it would just create more fifedoms than we have already.
I have not had a single issue with care since 1995 when they performed the wrong procedure (fortunately the correct knee, and they only did a arthroscopy instead of the more serious procedure I was to have). it took me years before I would walk into a VAMC again. The Boston Care System is top notch in my opinion, and from personal experience as a patient. Some hamstringing in the ease of getting MRI’s based on “cost” for example, but otherwise excellent.
Not all VAMC’s are created equal. There is just far too little uniformity across the board, and that goes for all 3 Divisions of the VA. No two are alike, and that is where we begin to run into all the problems.
My current claim had to be reassigned from the Boston Regional Office to White River Junction because Boston is so far behind. Why?? I have no idea if it is leadership issues, lack of proper training, not enough staff to handle the workload…a combination of all of the above?
The system works in some places and broken beyond repair in other. To me that is a leadership issue.
I fully understand that, rb325th. However, many of those functions are at best marginally related to each other – and in some cases, are completely unrelated. And IMO, some of those functions are at odds with one-another; and many of them are inherently in conflict with being being good stewards of public resources.
Trying to do or manage too many unrelated things simultaneously is a prescription for disaster. IMO it’s eminently possible the VA has passed that point.
Shitsacki needs to be shitcanned.
We need to convince Gen Mattis to take the job…
I was just thinking that. I think Jim Mattis could fix that place and clean house.
Sadly, USMCE8Ret, I have to disagree. While parts of the VA work reasonably well, other parts are so badly broken that IMO they’re literally FUBAR. And there’s not IMO a unity of mission.
Is the VA’s mission to hand out money? To provide loans? To provide healthcare? To investigate and determine service connection? To provide insurance? To house the homeless? To provide counseling?
And it damn sure isn’t being a “good steward of public resources”. Don’t even get me started on that after some of the examples of waste/fraud/abuse we’ve seen involving the VA and questionable to outright fraudulent claims.
I submit that the VA doesn’t presently know its actual goals and mission. So it instead tries to be all things to all people under it’s vague, umbrella mandate to “care for veterans”.
But in trying to be everything for everyone, it simply can’t do a damn thing well. Even with a $170+ billion budget, it simply doesn’t have the resources to be be all things to all people.
And the missions are so disparate that IMO barring a miracle it never will be able to do them all well.
Jim Mattis would put the fear of God into the VA system… and get them on the right track in a real hurry.
Maybe if the General just gave everyone a new hat, things would be better.
The problem I see in Shinseki stepping down or being removed is that the POTUS does not have the greatest track record in picking agengy leaders. To this add the ramp up time to “come on board” for a new person, then all the inquiries and investigations, then the resulting review panels and before you know it we are two, three years down the road before anything changes for the better. I still want Shinseki gone on principal alone. But a new leader has built in excuses waiting on his desk. Yes I think a former General officer like Mattis would cut to the chase a lot better but Obama will NEVER go that route.
He will never be asked to leave by this administration simply because he is doing exactly what they are paying him to do.