RUTHFULLY YOURS

Three years after the 2014 Veterans Health Administration scandal erupted in headlines, outrage, investigations, and the resignation of then-secretary of veterans’ affairs Eric Shinseki, veterans still must contend with an agency that provides less than stellar service.

A government report issued in February found that the VA’s shift to using more private-sector care for veterans has its own problems. They include cumbersome authorization and scheduling procedures, inadequate provider networks, and the potential for veterans having to pay their own treatment costs. Plus wait times for care, the heart of the 2014 scandal, are still long: an average of 45 days for 53% of veterans.

Problematic health care, as well as the descent into homelessness for a growing number of our nation’s veterans, belies our posture of national pride in our troops. We label them heroes, and then we fail to properly provide for them.

The problems of inadequate health care began to surface in 2012 and 2013, when two doctors at the Phoenix VA Health Care System voiced concerns. The whistleblowers said they had witnessed substandard care, that VA officials had falsified health service wait times, and that 40 veterans died while waiting for health care. These claims were later verified by the Veterans Administration, and investigations began nationwide.

A 2014 General Accounting Office audit of 731 VA medical centers and outpatient clinics reported that roughly 100,000 veterans nationwide were experiencing long wait times for health care. Another VA report detailed specific techniques used to falsify wait times.

Still other allegations of mismanagement surfaced in 2014, when a congressional committee revealed that more than $380,000 in bonuses were awarded to directors and top executives of 38 VA facilities where falsification of records and delays in care were being examined. The money was part of $2.7 million in extra pay given in 2013 to top-ranking VA officials.

Further, a 2015 VA report found that the VA had such sloppy record keeping that 307,000 veterans out of 867,000 pending cases on the VA’s list of electronic records were actually deceased. VA officials could not conclude if the veterans had received care, were still waiting for care, or had even applied for care. Nonetheless, some concluded that those veterans had died while waiting for medical help.

If you’ve only followed coverage of the Republican health-care bill loosely in the media, you might believe that House Republicans, after much effort, passed legislation to deny people with pre-existing conditions health insurance.

The issue of pre-existing conditions has dominated the debate over the GOP health-care bill out of all proportion to the relatively modest provision in the legislation, which is being distorted — often willfully, sometimes ignorantly — into a threat to all that is good and true in America.

The perversity of it all is that the legislation is properly understood as doing more to preserve the Obamacare regulation on pre-existing conditions than to undermine it. The legislation maintains a federal baseline of protection in such cases, and says only that states can apply for a waiver from it, provided that they abide by certain conditions meant to ensure that no one is left out in the cold.

Since these provisions only involve the individual insurance market, a small slice of the overall insurance picture (about 18 million are on the individual market), and merely make possible state waivers, they are inherently limited.

You’re not affected if you get insurance through your employer (155 million people), or through Medicaid or Medicare. You’re not affected if you live in a state that doesn’t request the waiver, a category that will certainly include every blue state and most red states, too. Even if you buy insurance on the individual market and live in a state that gets a waiver, you’re not affected if you’ve maintained insurance coverage continuously and not had a gap in coverage longer than 63 days.

By this point, we’re talking about a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the population. If you do have a pre-existing condition in a waiver state and haven’t had continuous coverage, you can be charged more by your insurer only the first year. The state will have access to $8 billion in federal funds explicitly to ease the cost of your insurance, and the state must further have a high-risk pool or similar program to mitigate insurance costs for the sick.

Clearly, if Republicans set out to recklessly endanger the well-being of people with pre-existing conditions, they didn’t do a very good job of it. The purpose of these provisions isn’t to punish people who are sick, but to create an incentive for people to buy insurance while they are healthy. (The Obamacare exchanges are failing because the law’s tangle of regulations drove up costs and made insurance economically unappealing to the young and healthy.)

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, an Obama administration holdover, testified on Monday before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee in connection with the ongoing investigation into alleged Russian interference with last year’s presidential election. There were no major revelations during over three hours of testimony. The saga of General Michael Flynn, whom served briefly as President Trump’s national security adviser before being dismissed for misleading Trump administration officials about his Russian contacts, was a recurrent theme of the hearing. Another was the unmasking of the names of Trump associates on whom information was incidentally collected during the course of surveillance focused on foreign targets, and the leaks to the media that followed.

Both Mr. Clapper and Ms. Yates said they had viewed classified documents in which the identities of Donald Trump or his associates had been unmasked, but declined to provide any details. Ms. Yates indicated that she herself had not asked for any such unmasking. Mr. Clapper said that he had at least on one occasion requested unmasking involving a Trump associate. Both denied having leaked any such information to the press. Moreover, neither was aware of any classified information relating to Mr. Trump or his associates being declassified and then shared with the media.

Mr. Clapper reaffirmed his conclusion that no evidence existed of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. He also confirmed that during his investigation he did not find a situation where a Trump business interest in Russia gave him concern during the course of the preparation of the intelligence communities’ assessment.

Ms. Yates refused to state where she stood on the collusion issue in the public subcommittee setting, falling back on a justification she used repeatedly in not answering any questions that she claimed “would require me to reveal classified information.”

Despite getting no support from either Mr. Clapper or Ms. Yates on the existence of supposed collusion, Democrats on the subcommittee nevertheless kept hammering away on their speculative conspiracy theories without any evidence to support them. That is one reason why they kept coming back to the Flynn story, in an effort to draw broad but unsupportable inferences of something even more nefarious at work.

Ms. Yates claimed to have warned the White House, in particular White House Counsel Don McGahn, during the very early days of the Trump administration regarding Flynn’s misleading statements on his prior contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. “The Russians also knew what Gen. Flynn had done and that Gen. Flynn had misled the Vice President and others…that created a compromise situation — a situation where the national security advisor essentially could be blackmailed by the Russians,” Ms. Yates said. In addition to the concern that Flynn was compromised, she said “we felt like the Vice President was entitled to know that the information he had been given, and that he was relaying to the American public, wasn’t true.”

Mr. Clapper confirmed the role that British intelligence, along with other allies, played in sharing information they had with U.S. intelligence officials regarding purported links between Russians and Trump associates. He said the specifics were “quite sensitive.” Curiously, however, the former director of national intelligence claimed to have been in the dark about the FBI’s own investigation into the Russian-Trump campaign relationship.