WASHINGTON — U.S. President Barack Obama’s Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary, retired Army general Eric Shinseki, resigned yesterday morning. He had resisted calls from veterans’ groups and politicians to step down among a nationwide scandal, where veterans were denied timely health care by department employees.
Shinseki was a retired four-star Army general and had been in charge at the Veterans Affairs since 2009. However, the recent revelations of widespread abuse of the health care system intended to treat America’s veterans led him to step down.
The scandal involved employees at several hospitals and medical care facilities in Phoenix, Arizona and in other states across the country, where employees put veterans on secret wait lists in order to look like their facility was treating veterans on a timely basis. However, as in the case of one of the Phoenix facilities, wait times were about 115 days for veterans, or almost four months.
At least 40 veterans died without receiving health care due to the secret wait lists in Phoenix, and other whistleblowers are indicating the same at other Veterans Affairs locations.
President Barack Obama is now facing yet another scandal under his presidency, adding to Benghazi, IRS targeting, Fast and Furious and others. Even liberal TV host Chris Matthews said that the scandal regarding veterans and health care was a real scandal by his standards.
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