The resignation of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki gives President Obama the chance to thoroughly reform the feds’ troubled health-care system for vets.
Shinseki had to go in the face of mounting disclosures that the VA had not only tolerated but created widespread failures to provide speedy care to veterans, covered up that massive screw-up with double sets of books and paid cash bonuses to the managers responsible for this mind-boggling misfeasance.
Cashiering Shinseki was the easy part for Obama. Now comes the difficult work of improving the performance of a 300,000-strong agency that delivers medical and other services at hundreds of locations across the country. The President must find a turnaround specialist par excellence , preferably one with health-care expertise.
For the moment, the VA is in the hands of Acting Secretary Sloan Gibson, who joined the agency just three months ago and was at Shinseki’s side as he belatedly began to take action. Given his short tenure, Gibson was not part of the problem; hopefully he has what it takes to be part of the solution.
Among the critical items on the to-do list:
* Set a realistic standard for how long vets must wait for medical appointments, and then live up to it. The VA now promises to get patients to doctors within 14 days but hasn’t come close to meeting that vow.
* End the bonuses that gave managers incentives to present false statistics showing compliance with the 14-day standard. VA officials have been aware since at least 2005 that staff across the country had rigged up “scheduling schemes,” but took no effective action to stop them.
* Build a streamlined and effective management system. It was embarrassing to hear Obama go on about how the central VA offices in Washington, never mind the White House, had no idea about the systematic fraud — despite numerous press accounts and internal reports detailing it.
* Bring in honest regional leaders, along with modernized records and computer systems.
* Wipe out the VA’s shortage of primary-care doctors by hiring dozens, if not hundreds, of frontline physicians.
* Map out where VA facilities and veterans are located, and bridge the gap that’s too often between them.
* Maintain the VA’s strengths, including systems that have helped cut veterans’ homelessness, improved care for female veterans and provided quality service to vets after they managed to find their way into the system.
After the debacle of his health-care website, Obama is facing the huge challenge of proving that he can make big government work effectively. He must succeed.
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