Scapegoats Won't Cure VA's Ills
What is to be done? Calls for VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, a decorated veteran who lost part of a foot in the Vietnam War, to resign sound more like scapegoating -- a familiar Washington ritual -- than problem solving.
You could see that reflex at work in the administration's unimpressive announcement that Dr. Robert Petzel, the VA's undersecretary for health, resigned, even though he was about to retire in less than a month anyway.
"We don't need the VA to find a scapegoat," as a statement released by the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America said. "We need an actual plan to restore a culture of accountability throughout the VA."
Indeed, step one must be for the Obama administration to figure out what happened in Phoenix and other facilities, hold the right people accountable and do whatever it can to help veterans currently waiting for services.
Congress and the administration should listen to experts on veterans issues like Linda Bilmes at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In congressional testimony, she called for replacing the existing system, which already approves 90 percent of claims from newly returning veterans, with one that approves all of them and then audits a representative sample afterwards to catch fraud.
That common-sense idea would take a giant step toward fulfilling the too-often broken promises that we, a grateful nation, make to veterans for their service. Everyone in Congress and the White House says they support our troops. It's time for them and the rest of us to show it.
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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
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