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How the VA fails veterans on mental health By Kathleen McGrory and Neil Bedi, ProPublica This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
VOL. 12,
NO. 155
Hunter Biden pleads not guilty in Los Angeles to tax charges By Fred Shuster, City News Service
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veteran with a known history of suicidal thoughts showed up at a St. Louis hospital before dawn one morning and was left unmonitored in an exam room for hours. Another was deemed at risk of suicide by a hospital psychiatrist in Washington, D.C., then forcibly discharged, even as he tried to stay, by the same hospital’s emergency department. Another still in Pittsburgh was assigned a behavioral health nurse who failed to complete thorough suicide screenings or review his suicide safety plan, and didn’t follow up when he said he wished he was dead. In all three cases, independent inspectors documented serious failures by the Department of Veterans Affairs. And in all three cases, the veterans involved went on to kill themselves or other people. The lapses were similar to ones examined by ProPublica Jan. 6 in an investigation of the VA’s handling of two veterans with serious mental disorders. Both suffered for years with inadequate care from the same clinic in Northern California, they told reporters. Their stories ended in tragedy. The problems appear to be systemic. Over and over, the hospitals and clinics in the VA’s sprawling health care network have fallen short when it comes to treating people with mental illness. That conclusion emerges from a ProPublica review of all of the reports published by the VA’s inspector general since 2020. That includes 162 regular surveys of facilities and 151 investigations that were triggered by a complaint or call to
Disabled, homeless Vietnam veteran. | Photo by Gilbert Mercier CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED
the office on a wide variety of alleged health care problems. Issues with mental health care surfaced in half of the routine inspections. Employees botched screenings meant to assess veterans’ risk of suicide or violence; sometimes they didn’t perform the screenings at all. They missed mandatory mental health training programs and failed to follow up with patients as required by VA protocol. One in 4 of the reports stemming from calls or complaints detailed similar breakdowns. In the most extreme cases, facilities lost track of veterans or failed to prevent suicides under their own roofs. Sixteen veterans who received the substandard care killed either themselves
or other people, the review revealed. An additional five died for reasons related to the poor care, such as a bad drug interaction that the reports say could have been prevented. Twenty-one such deaths is a meaningful count even for a health care system that has more than 9 million people enrolled, in the view of Charles Figley, a Tulane University professor and expert in military mental health. The VA has struggled with mental health care for decades, he said. “It’s a national disgrace.” For grieving family members, it is incomprehensible. “It was never my expectation that [the VA was] going to solve his problems,” said Colin Domek, the son of See Mental health Page 12
the veteran in Pittsburgh. “My expectations were that someone who was saying ‘help me’ would receive some kind of help.” The inspector general reports reviewed by ProPublica have limitations. The individual investigations can be narrow. The reports offer only broad suggestions as to whether individuals should be held accountable for breakdowns and provide little sense of whether they actually were. Even together, they don’t capture the full reality of the VA’s 1,300 health care facilities. But they do start to assemble a meaningful picture of the system’s most chronic shortcomings when it comes to treating people
Hunter Biden. | Photo courtesy of Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/ Wikimedia Commons (CC0)
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ne day after Hunter Biden’s appearance on Capitol Hill at a committee meeting over whether to hold him in contempt of Congress, President Joe Biden’s son pleaded not guilty Thursday in Los Angeles federal court to unrelated tax charges. Hunter Biden was charged in an indictment returned Dec. 7 on nine federal tax charges for allegedly refusing to pay his taxes, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Biden, 53, of Malibu, “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills,” the indictment alleges. The president’s son appeared in the federal courtroom in downtown Los Angeles for a combined arraignment hearing and status conference in the case. “We’re here today because you’ve been accused of a criminal offense,” U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi told the defendant, who appeared relaxed in a dark suit as he sat between his two lawyers. Asked if he understood the nature of the charges, Hunter Biden answered, “Yes, your honor.” A throng of TV cameras awaited Biden’s appearance outside the courthouse. About three dozen reporters watched the arraignment in the judge’s seventh-floor courtroom and in a nearly empty overflow room. See Hunter Biden Page 23