Only after everybody and his cousin here in Arkansas raised a royal ruckus about it in January were a couple of employees of the Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System assigned to other jobs. Not fired on the spot, not sacked at once, not sent home and told not to return without a doctor's excuse, or anything else. Only given the lightest tap on the wrist, not even admonished never to let anything like this happen again. Both had their paychecks raised after the whistle was blown on 'em. And went on collecting hefty salaries from the state, aka you and me, brother.
Uncle Sucker never learns, does he? In March, Jacquelyn Riggins was still pulling down $46,705 a year while Anthony Hatchett was getting $87,258. To add insult to repeated injury, Hatchett was put in charge of instructing others in--what, how to game the system?
French Hill--the congressman from a large part of this state--has called for the immediate removal of any of the VA's employees who doctor patient data, not real living patients. But naturally its passage has been delayed. "The longer this story goes on," he's noted, "and the more details that emerge, it becomes increasingly clear that VA's only motivation for discipline is to quell public outrage."
Let's hear it for Daniel Wheeler, the unsung hero who scheduled appointments at the VA, and wouldn't let it get away with this continuing outrage.
Jeff Miller, a congressman from Florida, also put it plain:
"CAVHS leaders refused to fire those responsible. To make matters worse, CAVHS officials tried to hide these issues from veterans, the public, and even the president of the United States by shrouding them in a cloud of secrecy and misleading the Office of Special Counsel regarding the actions they were taking to hold the responsible employees accountable."
Hillary, Bernie, you still back there? If so, please stop helping us. For here you have your oh-so-ideal, single-payer system writ small. Why waste your time trying to envision it? It's right here before your stunned eyes. It's a (non-)working model anybody can understand all too well--and shudder at. Down the slippery slope we go, and where we stop nobody knows. Sometimes disasters cast their shadows before rather than after. As in this sad case. And you can anticipate its being copied, in triplicate, as we plow into bureaucratic fields never known before. What a tragicomedy. It could have been written by our favorite Marxist--Groucho.
Make no little plans, advised architect and urban designer Daniel Burnham, whose work still stands across the country as a testament to what American genius can accomplish when given free rein. But in his place we seem to have adopted the motto, Make No Plans at All.
Yet instead of an explanation, all We the People get is more gobbledygook. Enough. It's long past time that all of us lost patience with this crew. To quote an immortal line offered by a top-ranking federal bureaucrat in the midst of Hurricane Katrina, "you're doing a heck of a job."
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 06/01/2016