WASHINGTON -- The White House announced Tuesday that it is dispatching one of President Barack Obama's top aides to investigate deaths purportedly connected to a Department of Veterans Affairs medical center in Phoenix.
Meanwhile, the number of VA facilities under investigation concerning complaints about falsified records and treatment delays has more than doubled in recent days, the Office of Inspector General at the Veterans Affairs Department said late Tuesday.
A spokesman for the office said 26 facilities are being investigated nationwide. Acting Inspector General Richard Griffin told a Senate committee last week that at least 10 new allegations about manipulated waiting times and other problems had surfaced since reports of problems at the Phoenix VA hospital came to light last month.
Rob Nabors, a White House deputy chief of staff, has been assigned to assist top agency officials in probing allegations of wrongdoing by staff members at the Phoenix VA hospital and elsewhere. He will be meeting with Arizona hospital officials Thursday after meeting today with representatives from several veterans organizations in Washington, according to the White House.
Republicans have seized on the recent allegations as potential fodder for this fall's midterm elections, and a few GOP senators have called for the resignation of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki. Obama "has confidence" in Shinseki, said White House press secretary Jay Carney, who added that administration officials will wait for the results of an internal review at the VA before taking any action against high-ranking officials.
The agency's inspector general is looking into allegations by a former clinic director in Phoenix that up to 40 veterans died while waiting for treatment at the VA hospital while staff members disguised the wait times that patients faced. Shinseki is conducting his own review with the help of Nabors, who was temporarily assigned last week to help the agency overhaul its practices.
"We are of the view that the kinds of allegations we have seen need to be investigated rigorously, and once we have all the facts, accountable individuals need to be held to account," Carney said. "The investigation needs to continue and needs to be completed, and then we can assess what the facts are."
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has said that firing Shinseki would only hamper the administration's ability to address "systemic" issues at the department. But House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said Tuesday morning that he was "disturbed" by reports suggesting that Obama first learned of the allegations against the agency through news reports.
"It is time for our president to come forward and take responsibility for this and do the right thing by these veterans and begin to show that he actually cares about getting it straight," Cantor said.
Rep. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., an Iraq war veteran, double-amputee and former assistant secretary of Veterans Affairs, said the recent allegations are similar to problems she faced at the department from 2009-11.
"I'm not surprised, because it's such a large network that you're going to find problems," Duckworth said.
But she expressed support for Shinseki and said he should not resign.
"I think he should fix it," Duckworth said. "I'm not trying to put words in his mouth here, but I would think that he would want to fix it."
Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Jerry Moran, D-Kan., have called for Shinseki's resignation, and the matter became hot topic in some midterm races. Cornyn went further Tuesday by suggesting that Obama should withdraw the nomination of Jeffrey Murawsky to serve as the new VA undersecretary for veterans health.
"Instead of nominating a reformer from outside the VA system," Cornyn said that Obama opted to nominate a "career administrator" from within the department's ranks.
Senate Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., said in an interview Monday that politicization of the issue would be "unconscionable." He said representatives of service organizations who testified before his committee last week agreed that the VA continues to provide quality health care to veterans.
"Obviously, there's an issue that we must focus on -- the issue of access and getting veterans into the system and, very significantly, the issue of waiting times," Sanders said. "We can't confuse the fact that health care in the system is good, but we have issues with waiting times."
Carney said a chronic backlog of veterans' disability claims at the Veterans Affairs Department had been cut nearly in half over the past year. But he said the VA network has been strained by new policies streamlining disability claims for those exposed to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War or suffering post-traumatic stress disorder from serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
House lawmakers today are expected to approve the VA Accountability Act, a bill sponsored by House Veterans' Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller, R-Fla., that would make it easier to fire any "poorly performing" senior agency employees and managers.
Miller and his colleagues wrote the bill in response to a year-long committee investigation that found at least 20 "preventable veteran deaths" in the VA system. The probe also determined that more than 50 veterans were seriously harmed by delays in endoscopies and other procedures in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and other states. The majority of the deaths occurred in 2010 and 2011, according to the report.
Some Democrats have become more vocal in expressing disappointment with the Obama administration's handling of veterans issues. In Michigan, Rep. Gary Peters, who is running for the state's open U.S. Senate seat, wrote in a letter to Shinseki on Monday that ensuring that veterans are receiving proper medical care is "the most pressing and immediate issue."
"We've got to get to the point where we don't need a congressional or senatorial office to help you get into the system," Peters said. "It's got to work seamlessly for our veterans."
Information for this article was contributed by Scott Clement and Peyton M. Craighill of The Washington Post and by Matthew Daly of The Associated Press.
A Section on 05/21/2014