“Unnecessary Risks” For Patients: Yet Another Veterans Hospital Investigation Finds Troubling Conditions

By Lily Dane

“Taking care of our veterans is a cost of war. If you can spend six trillion dollars sending people to war, you can spend a few billion dollars taking care of them when they come home.” – Senator Bernie Sanders

Sanders may get a lot of things wrong, but he’s absolutely correct here.

The war machine continues to create more veterans, but the government isn’t taking adequate care of the ones it has already created.

Today, the Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General issued a rare preliminary report to alert patients and the public about the dangerous conditions at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

That VA location is about four miles away from the department’s national headquarters and a block away from the White House. It has faced problems for “some time” without improvements, the report states.

It “serves” more than 98,000 veterans in the region.

The investigation, which stemmed from an anonymous complaint on March 21, found that during the past three years, there have been 194 reports that patient safety has been compromised because of insufficient equipment.

Among the findings:

• In February 2016, a tray used in repairing jaw fractures was removed from the hospital because of an outstanding invoice to a vendor.


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