When VA doctors aren’t doctors

#Middlebury #Veterans

Consider this: A Department of Veterans Affairs medical employee, whose salary is paid for by the taxpayers and who is on the VA list of employees, doesn’t actually work any hours at the VA because that employee is union and spends all his time doing union business.

Like that? No, I don’t either.

It gets worse. During the last fiscal year for which this record was kept (2016), those VA union employees pulled over a million hours on union business, to the tune of $49 million in salary, which we paid for. Officially, it’s called “Taxpayer Funded Union Time.”

Who are these people? Dentists, nurses, physicians, chiropractors – people from the whole list of medical professions – were pulled aside, away from doing actual medical work. (And people wonder why we can’t get a timely medical appointment and we’re told they’re understaffed.)

This collective bargaining agreement mess happened during the previous presidential administration and involved four different medical unions. Here’s an example given in a VA.gov press release: A VA nurse was elected as a union official, getting 100 percent of her $90,000 salary paid for by the taxpayers while doing zero medical work.

Now, fingers crossed, employees like that nurse will be coming back to their real jobs when the VA stands up to some of those collective bargaining agreements. The VA will pull those union employees back under Title 38 of the U.S. Code for medical employees, and this will apply to all of its 104,000 employees. No longer will taxpayers fork out dollars to pay for those people to do union work.

I honestly don’t get it. If I had gone to all the time and trouble of getting a medical degree, I would be embarrassed to spend my time not taking care of patients and instead working for a union.

(c) 2018 King Features Synd. Inc.