Bad VA doctors shouldn’t get rewarded

Just when we thought the mistakes made by the Veterans Administration couldn’t get much worse. The VA hospital system has been under fire in recent years for a variety of mis-steps. The Tomah VA hospital became the poster child for the over-prescription of powerful medications. The facility earned the nickname “Candyland” for the penchant to hand out opiates like they were candy on Halloween. That has prompted some legislative changes from Congress, but clearly more needs to be done. We are now learning that the doctors who were passing out all those drugs, while no longer working at the facility, are still employed in the medical field. And, even worse, when they left they were handed golden parachutes. At the Tomah VA, Doctor Mario DeSanctis was fired following the death of a Marine who died at the Tomah VA from a cocktail of 13 powerful prescriptions. But DeSanctis fought the firing, and the VA ended up settling with him. He was awarded $163,000 in taxpayer money and left with a clean record, free to continue practicing elsewhere. A report by USA Today finds such payouts at VA Hospitals across the country to those who didn’t deserve it totaled nearly $7 million. That is inexcusable. These are people who did not serve honorably, who failed to provide proper leadership and should not be entitled to a dime of taxpayer money. While many reforms have been made in the VA System in light of what happened in Tomah, clearly more reforms are needed.