VA reformer’s gaffes prove costly

By Martin Schram

Tribune News Service

For several weeks, I had been reporting for a column that would urge a very specific action that our next president needs to not only undertake but announce way early.

I was going to suggest that tomorrow’s adversaries issue a unique bipartisan announcement – perhaps during this Memorial Day week – as a tribute to all those who have fought our country’s battles. My idea was to urge our Republican and Democratic candidates for president to agree to ask Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert McDonald to stay and finish his reforms. Can sheer patriotism convince Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and still-campaigning Bernie Sanders to agree at least to ask McDonald to complete the impressive reforms he began in the summer of 2014? After decades in which America flailed and failed to keep our promises to our military men and women, we owe them at least that much.

But have you ever noticed that every time you’re fixing to do something good (maybe even too-good), someone or something else comes along and mucks it all up? Well, it looks like it’s just happened again.

McDonald, a West Point grad who served in the 82nd Airborne Division and later became CEO of Proctor & Gamble, took over the pathetically mismanaged VA less than two years ago and has instituted a series of impressive reforms. One, called MyVA Access – has as its goal that by the end of 2016, every veteran will get same day access to primary health care at a VA facility.

What makes all that so important today is that last Monday, McDonald, asked about veterans’ continuing complaints about VA wait times for treatment and benefits, clumsily tried to compare it to people who wait in lines at Disneyland. He was seeking to explain his new VA thrust that he wants veterans to feel satisfied by the overall service they eventually receive. But of course Republicans and Democrats quickly attacked him for trivializing the veterans’ wait times. Several Republicans called for him to resign.

Sad failures

As faithful readers can attest, this column has long been on the forefront of those shining a light on our nation’s sad failures to deliver the prompt and proper service, care and benefits our military veterans earned. Eight years ago (back before it became a popular cause) my book, “Vets Under Siege: How America Deceives and Dishonors Those Who Fight Our Battles,” told the sad tales of generations of veterans who were delayed and sometimes wrongly denied treatment and benefits.

That book began with the enraging tale of Army E-4 Specialist Bill Florey, who served with the 82nd Airborne in the Persian Gulf War in 1991 when U.S. troops exploded Saddam Hussein’s weapons depot that unfortunately contained sarin nerve gas warheads. The toxic plume washed over our troops. A decade later, a bump near Florey’s right temple appeared and grew larger; but his Dallas Veterans Affairs hospital kept delaying his request for an imaging scan. Doctors just injected it with penicillin, but it kept growing. Finally, Florey got a VA scan appointment; but at the VA hospital Florey and his friend, Francesca Yabraian, were told there was a mix-up. No scan was possible. Maybe in a couple of weeks. At which point, Yabraian erupted in a voice that echoed loudly through a huge room with many curtained examining areas: “I am not leaving this room until you get on the phone and order an MRI – for today! And if you don’t do it right now, you will have to drag me out of this hospital!”

VA doctors did the MRI that day. Diagnosis: an aggressive cancer had by then penetrated deep into Florey’s brain and was now inoperable. Florey died without ever complaining about the VA delays he endured while his cancer spread.

This week, McDonald stalled for several news cycles before issuing his inevitable statement that included the words “I deeply regret.”

Early this month, McDonald outlined his impressive reforms at Washington’s renowned Center for Strategic and International Studies. CSIS President Dr. John Hamre, a former deputy defense secretary, delivered an unusually effusive introduction, likening McDonald’s willingness to enter the VA to the firefighters of 9/11 who ran up into the World Trade Center towers when everyone was running down and fleeing. “It is an enormous privilege for us to have him serve at this time,” Hamre said on May 4. “He is doing a fabulous, fabulous job.”

Indeed, McDonald is. But, practical politics, being what it is, I’d better put my latest political idea on hold. At least for just a bit.

Martin Schram is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service