Obama Tries to contain scandal of death of 40 veterans

The White House starts investigations into the scandal of the death of at least 40 retired soldiers while they were on the waiting list at a hospital in Arizona. The U.S. government announced on Tuesday that President Barack Obama appointed Rob Nabors to investigate allegations of negligence at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Phoenix in which the deaths occurred.

The scandal, uncovered in late April, is based on the accusations made by doctors at least 40 soldiers died last year while on the waiting list for treatment. According to these claims, hospital officials ordered the doctors to put these patients on a secret list as open spaces were not available on the official list. Some veterans were up to 21 months without being served. “We have more demand for service we can offer,” complained one of the doctors. One of the veterans, for example, died from complications of hypertension, obesity and asthma while waiting to give him an appointment for a primary care physician.

The worst of this controversy is that this would not be an isolated case. Veterans’ associations have reported similar cases of concealment of long waiting lists at hospitals in the states of Colorado, Texas, Missouri, Illinois, Wyoming and North Carolina. The Department of Veterans Affairs is the largest healthcare system in the United States, with 1,700 hospitals and care centers that serve approximately nine million retired soldiers

Obama announced on Wednesday,  his Deputy Section Head, Rob Nabors, help supervise the investigation and the measures to be taken. “As we got to the bottom of what happened in Phoenix, it is clear that the VA must do more to ensure quality care for our veterans,” then said the president, who has expressed support for the Secretary of Veterans.

Nabors met Tuesday in Washington with representatives of various veterans’ organizations, a group especially revered in a country with a long military tradition and whose delicate psychological state after serving in the Army have in focus the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And on Thursday in Phoenix will do the acting director of the VA hospital in the city, the epicenter of this controversy. The former director was removed by management when the allegations were revealed and will out of office while holding the internal investigation of the facts, which could result in a criminal case.

The Republican opposition is trying to fully exploit this scandal. The majority party in the House of Representatives will vote on Wednesday on the full proposed legislation to grant the Secretary of Veterans greater authority to dismiss and divert senior department and medical centers. For conservatives, the resignation on Friday of the secretary of Veterans Affairs Health Robert Petzel, is an insufficient step for already planned to retire along this year.

Republicans are focusing much of their offense in the role of Shinseki and Obama. The future of the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, in office since 2009 and served 38 years in the Army, including the Vietnam War, could falter if he fails to show in the coming weeks that he was really unaware of the apparently widespread practice of cover-ups.

Short URL: https://www.newspakistan.pk/?p=44290

Posted by Nadeem Bajwa on May 22 2014. Filed under Latest News, USA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.