Friday, July 4, 2014

HONOR WITH INDIFFERENCE-JIM NAPOLEAN GARCIA-71 YR.OLD VET DIES IN HOSPITAL CAFETERIA, 500 YARDS FROM ER, DELAYED BY VA POLICY TO CALL 911

Could the bureaucracy at Veterans Affairs hospitals get any worse even as we celebrate the Declaration of Independence today July 4, 2014 and remember the soldiers who took up arms for our freedom? 

On Thursday, July 3rd, Jim Napoleon Garcia, a
71 year old Vietnam War veteran died at the Albuquerque, New Mexico Veteran Affairs hospital. 

The man collapsed in the cafeteria, which is only 500 yards away from the emergency room. 

Rather than the hospital staff running and grabbing a gurney to rush the man to the ER, they instead called an ambulance, as was mandated by protocol, and attempted CPR while they waited. 

Although the ambulance was called immediately after the man collapsed and the ER was less than a five-minute walk from where he was, it took 30 minutes for the ambulance to arrive. By that time, the human victim of this moronic stupidity was dead. 

VA spokeswoman Sonja Brown, who performed CPR to no avail until the ambulance finally arrived said, “Our policy is under expedited review.” Wow, that's swell of them to expedite it.

Meanwhile, a family will be without their loved one on Independence Day because of the deliberate stupidity of VA "protocol" at the VA that potentially cost a man his life.

This is one of the most ignorant reasons for someone dying. 

Wasn't there someone around who was passionate enough about saving a life that they would throw policy out the window and do the right thing, get a gurney, and push him to the next building to save his life. 

How do people get to be so complacent? Every day I hear or read something that makes me think I've heard or seen the worst thing that could ever happen, but the next day there is another one. What has happened to the humanity of the human race?

While Patriotism is the most significant, common-core value that Americans share between themselves, our soldiers have been one of the most abused class of people in this entire country.

Hypocritically, both Republicans and Democrats tout the honor and commitment that these men and women give, and die doing every day, and while both parties frame as many political issues within the contextual theater of troops, the defense of our country, and War, the second they get off that podium. the very second!, they act in ways that are 180 degrees opposed to what they just said one second earlier. How do these people live with themselves, I ask myself.



Problems at the VA predated President Obama’s Democrat administration, but as part of his 2008 election campaign, Obama vowed to fix the VA. Nothing much has changed for the better from previous President's administrations.

Our heroes have been suffering for DECADES at the hands of the unconcerned, incompetent,don't give a damn bureaucracy. I have written about this previously

(CLICK HERE) as a systemic, chronic crisis of long standing.

Conceivably, the VA should be the very best medical system in the country with the research that it can conduct, the research it should be able to conduct, with its membership rolls, and its ability to influence pricing nationwide, so that we do not see the current medical cost doubling every ten years,  phenomena rooted in greed, criminality, and the glaring absence of any one competent in charge. 


The death comes at the Department of Veterans Affairs remains under scrutiny for widespread reports of long delays for treatment, medical appointments and of veterans dying while on waiting lists.


To make matters worse, VA executives handed out fat performance bonuses to each other while these bureaucratic shenanigans were going on. 

On the subject of those bonuses, according to CNN, “78% of VA senior managers qualified for extra pay or other compensation in fiscal year 2013 by receiving ratings of ‘outstanding’ or ‘exceeds fully successful’…”

Also, a review last week cited 'significant and chronic system failures' in the nation's health system for veterans. 

Records of dead veterans were changed or physically altered, some even in recent weeks, to hide how many people died while waiting for care at the Phoenix VA hospital, a whistle-blower told CNN in stunning revelations that point to a new cover up in the ongoing VA scandal.


"Deceased" notes on files were removed to make statistics look better, so veterans would not be counted as having died while waiting for care, Pauline DeWenter said. ( CLICK HERE).

DeWenter should know. DeWenter is the actual scheduling clerk at the Phoenix VA who said for the better part of a year she was ordered by supervisors to manage and handle the so-called "secret waiting list," where veterans' names of those seeking medical care were often placed, sometimes left for months with no care at all.

The review also portrayed the struggling agency as one battling a corrosive culture of distrust, lacking in resources and ill-prepared to deal with an influx of new and older veterans with a range of medical and mental health care needs.

The scathing report by deputy White House chief of staff Rob Nabors said the Veterans Health Administration, the VA sub agency that provides health care to about 8.8 million veterans a year, has systematically ignored warnings about its deficiencies and must be fundamentally restructured.

Not only are Veterans forced to wait for ambulances, tens of thousands more veterans than previously reported are forced to wait at least a month for medical appointments at Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics, according to an updated audit of 731 VA medical facilities released in June.

The unnecessary death adds more weight to the preponderance of seeming widespread obscene incompetence plaguing the nation’s largest health care system.

While not addressing it in today's blog, this is certainly also happening in the dysfunctional overall private medical system of voodoo health care that exists for the rest of the American population.

The VA system, and the overall private medical system in America is not just a tragic scene, it is a crime scene.