WASHINGTON — Eric Shinseki resigned as secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department Friday after meeting face-to-face with President Obama about mounting evidence of widespread misconduct and mismanagement at the agency’s vast network of medical facilities.
In a statement Friday morning after the meeting, Mr. Obama said that Mr. Shinseki had offered his resignation from the post he has held since the beginning of the president’s administration. “With regret, I accepted,” Mr. Obama said.
According to a whistle-blowing Op Ed piece published in the Wall Street Journal, doctors and residents in the VA system were prevented from providing care to patients if their actions were deemed to be “making federal workers look bad” :
…”Scott Barbour, an orthopedic surgeon and a friend, trained at the Miami VA hospital. In an attempt to get more patients onto the operating-room schedule, he enlisted fellow residents to clean the operating rooms between cases and transport patients from their rooms into the surgical suites….
Instead of offering praise for their industriousness, the Chief of Surgery reprimanded the doctors and put a stop to their actions. From his perspective, they were not solving a problem but were making federal workers look bad and creating more work for others, like nurses, who had to take care of more post-op patients.”
Imagine that! Nurses having to take care of more post-op patients! You’d think they were working in a hospital or something…. It’s not like they can adjust their census to account for that, or anything. /s/. But, wait, there’s more ……