This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald's retreat this week from his foolish comparison between wait times at VA hospitals and waiting for a Disney ride was entirely predictable and would be forgettable too if it wasn't typical of the secretary's approach.
But it is unfortunately all too typical. McDonald has repeatedly downplayed, dismissed or misrepresented the depth of problems at his agency and even the nature of the attempted fixes. And he has belittled critical reports as "recycled and embellished" even though the media highlighted scandals that otherwise would have failed to come to light.
Just last month at a United Veterans Committee of Colorado banquet, McDonald suggested the VA had led the way in reforming "how we design, bid and construct facilities." In fact, as members of Colorado's congressional delegation were quick to point out, Congress "stripped the VA of construction authority" — in the words of U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet — because of incompetence.
And as Rep. Mike Coffman noted, it was absurd for McDonald to suggest the waiting-list scandal that surfaced first in Phoenix was due to a lack of training, when it was so clearly rooted in outright corruption.
Meanwhile, it isn't clear that wait times in many places have improved despite VA claims. Just last week "PBS NewsHour" reported that the VA has botched the Veterans Choice program that Congress created in the wake of the wait-time scandal to give veterans an option in private practice. The punch line: "We found that some veterans are actually trying the Choice program, and then it takes so long that thousands and thousands of them are returning to the VA and just saying, well, the appointment I would get here would be faster. Overall, wait times at the VA are worse than they were when this program started."
And yet this week McDonald was at it again. "What really counts is how does the veteran feel about their encounter with the VA," McDonald told reporters. "When you go to Disney, do they measure the number of hours you wait in line? Or what's important? What's important is what's your satisfaction with the experience."
Besides trivializing delays in access to life-and-death health services by comparing them to lines, say, for Cinderella Castle, McDonald also happened to be spectacularly wrong. As Scott Shackford at Reason's Hit & Run blog pointed out, "Disney has invested incredible sums of money in its efforts to reducing the amount of time people spend in lines and the friction caused by these waits" — from a FastPass to "micro-chipped wristbands designed to ease guests' planning and wait times while in the park."
McDonald has been VA chief two years, and apparently has been co-opted utterly by the bureaucracy. His resignation should be the first one the next president accepts.