The Department of Veterans' Affairs

The scandal at the Department of Veterans' Affairs is much bigger than it's medical problems. I once worked at the Department of Veterans' Affairs, May 2000 thru August 2001. I worked in the Director's office in the division handling disability claims.  The Department of Veterans' Affairs handles many veterans' benefits: home loans, GI Bill education benefits, disability claims, medical care, and probably more that I'm not aware of.

I use the VA hospital on occasion and I never had a problem with them. Then the scandal hit the news and things in the Albuquerque VA hospital kind of got strange. I called to make my annual mammogram appointment and the volunteer on the phone told me they would have to take my name and phone number so they could call me back, "because they were making an appointment for a veteran." Never got that line before, and didn't get a call back either. I waited two days and called again. This time a woman who told me she was the supervisor of the person who made the appointments said, "I don't know how to make the appointments, but if you give me your name and phone number, I will make sure the appointment maker calls you back." OK, how do you supervisor someone if you do not know how they do their job? Oh well, the next day another woman called me back and said she was the technician who performed the mammograms, and proceeded to tell me how overworked she was, but she did make me an appointment. Guess they were having more problems than I was aware of.

And, I sympathize with them, since I work for the government and we are now understaffed and underpaid. But, back in May 2000, when I worked in the Director's office, I didn't sympathize with the VA. I'm not going to name names here; but, the man who was in charge of the office where the disability claims were adjudicated, and believe me this was a big man must have weighed a good 300 pounds, was constantly bragged about how he was in the Army and worked in undercover operations in Vietnam.  (Bet he didn't weigh that much then.) He found great joy in turning down veteran claims for disability submitted by veterans who were involved in undercover or classified missions, had suffered injuries, but didn't have documentation to prove it.

One man had tried numerous time to get disability benefits because he had thrown himself on a live grenada to save his platoon. He finally sent a claim to the director with pictures of the skin graphs all over his body. The adjudicators still wouldn't give him benefits because when you work undercover or on classified missions, the military doesn't document that, or any injuries received, in your military or medical records. If you're real smart you go to a private doctor and have every injury documented.

Instead of helping veterans the employees in our department were too busy evesdropping on each other and starting interdepartmental rumors and problems. My job was going along fine and then one day the director stopped talking to me and avoiding me. Finally one day I had to give her some information and inform her I had to change my hours if possible because my husband and I were meeting with a marriage counselor to work out some personal problems. Once inside her office, she informed me that another employee had come to her with a conversation that was overheard, that I had been passing on some personal information about the director to a third party. She wanted to know why I was taling about her behind her back.

The coversation that was "overheard"concerned my personal problem, didn't have anything to do with the director. So, I told the director that when people are eavesdropping they usually don't get the entire story, so she could believe what she wanted, I would be looking for a better place to work.
Thus the short employment at the VA. I wouldn't work there again for anything.

Eric Shinseki had his hands full running the VA. No one person can be an expert in all of the benefits administered by that Department. He really needs to have people to head each division of the VA that are experts in that field: home loans, GI Bill for education, disability benefits, and medical. I think he got the shaft, as a lot of department heads do. He was a military general, they have colonels under them who are the experts. Mr. Shinseki gets run out of a job because the employees in the battlefields (so to speak) can't do their jobs properly or honestly. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, folks, and it ain't getting any better.