A former surgeon with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) recently claimed VA hospital administrators routinely manipulate hospital statistics by denying care to some patients to make their facilities look better and to earn more lucrative bonuses.
The whistleblower was Dr. Michael Mann, a professor of surgery at the University of California-San Francisco who worked at the Palo Alto VA in the 1990s and the San Francisco VA from 2003 to 2011. He was allegedly fired by the agency after he started questioning hospital policies for certain “high-risk” patients.
Dr. Mann immediately went public with this information, writing a book called “Mission Betrayed” about what he calls the “routine abuse and neglect of veterans that [he] witnessed over the course of 20 years’ exposure to the VA.” In his book, he claims VA hospital administrators developed their own set of statistics to use for hospital purposes, then manipulated them for their own purposes.
VA whistleblowers abound in recent years
The VA has had more than its share of controversy in recent years, with whistleblowers publicizing the Department’s secret waiting lists, failure to pay out benefits and various other scandals. The high-profile scandals have wrought havoc on the entire department and many of its individual chapters across the nation.
In many cases, whistleblowers are the only way these scandals come to light. Therefore, if you have any information about wrongdoing within your organization or agency, it is important to responsibly report it as soon as possible. Doing so not only can help to bring an end to fraudulent activity, but could also result in a sizeable financial reward.
To learn more about how to proceed with a whistleblower claim, speak with a skilled Dallas lawyer at Whistleblower Law for Managers.
