22 May 2014 –
The
Veterans Administration: Entrenched
Incompetence
My
experience with the VA spans fifty years.
My father was wounded in WWII and never fully recovered. The VA finally warehoused him at the hospital
in Fort Harrison, near Helena, Montana.
He died in March 1963, at age forty.
At my young age, only once was I able to visit the day room of my father’s
ward. I watched disabled patients hobble
around the room or sit motionless looking out the window. I asked an orderly who these men were. He said that they were WWII and Korean War
veterans waiting to die. No one, it seemed,
was helping them, or my father, to live.
I vow to never die in a VA hospital.
In
1978, I took my young family to Helena, Montana, to visit my mother. I got sick and since I was in the Air Force,
I went to Fort Harrison to see a doctor.
I was admitted instead of helped.
I spent the night looking out the window from the same floor where my
father had died fifteen years before. That
night, an old veteran died in the bed next to mine. In the morning, I went to take a shower as staff
moved his body. Apparently, I missed the
doctor’s rounds as well and had to run him down in the stairwell. I told the doctor I felt much better and that
I was going to leave the hospital immediately whether they gave me my clothes
back or not. He shrugged and said I
could leave. My wife picked me up at the
front door an hour later. I vowed to never
stay another night in a VA hospital.
In
December 2008, my wife and I were in Denver visiting our son and his
family. My wife developed a serious
infection, and we learned that the Fitzsimons VA Hospital handled all weekend
emergency cases for active-duty personnel and their dependents. At nearly midnight, over eight hours after entering
the not-so-busy emergency room, my wife was finally seen. With no apologies from any of the staff, my
wife finally got her prescription. I
will never again go to a VA hospital emergency room under my own power.
In
September 2009, I retired from the Air Force and applied to the VA for a service-related
disability. I was told that final
adjudication would take six months. After
nine months, a form letter told me it would take another six months. Eight months later, another letter told me
that I must resubmit all my paperwork. Finally,
13 months later, 2 ½ years after my first submission, my disability was
approved. It is a slight one, so I
receive little extra money in my retirement check. The concrete result is that I now weep for my
long-suffering compatriots who await just compensation for the serious
disabilities that prevent them from providing for their families. How many of them have died and will die waiting
for the VA to help them? I vow I will not
die waiting for the VA to do its job.
None
of the VA’s problems are new. They are a
systemic risk in any government-provided service, even where the leaders may be
good and decent people. Indeed, only high
performance standards and constant oversight keep the evils of government
bureaucracy from calcifying the process.
It
is always a question of leadership. We now
need leaders who will jam their fingers into the chests of entrenched bureaucrats
and demand performance or resignations.
We need leaders with the moral courage to risk their careers to care for
those who risked their lives to fight our nation’s battles. We need those who look at their jobs as
callings—as rescue missions for their compatriots. We need leaders the mention of whose names
makes self-serving bureaucrats tremble. Leaders,
not managers.
Neither
the present VA hierarchy nor the administration that appointed them has shown such
courageous leadership. Also, such moral
courage certainly won’t be found in the administrators of the upcoming civilian
version of the VA—the murderous monster rising out of the radioactive bog
called Obamacare. Paraphrasing President
Nixon as he described the coterie of generals who ran the Vietnam war: There wasn’t a General Patton among
them. Now, as then, we need a
Patton. In the White House and in the
VA. Until then, I repeat my vow: I refuse to die in a VA hospital. Send comments to Mac Coleman at mac.coleman.colonel@gmail.com.
