“Another Walter Reed-Type Scandal”

(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Soldiers at the military hospital languished in part due to incompatible databases and dismal record keeping. Welcome to the Pentagon’s $20 billion medical-records boondoggle.

The above subject title is a report, over at Mother Jones, I couldn’t think of a better title than used, really, written by Niko Karvounis who, according to the Mother Jones info at the end, is a program officer at The Century Foundation, where he researches health care, among other issues and is a regular contributor to HealthBeatBlog.org.

It’s one of those “Here we go again, on the incompetence and arrogance, of those that were placed on the public payroll under this corrupt and totally incompetent administration and arrogant wanna-be top CEO, only in his dreams, and complacent GOP congress up till the previous election!”.

I still can’t figure out the why so few, if any, are not running against the policies, or actually the non-policies of the previous GOP controlled congresses, under which six years were under total GOP control, from the administration on down.

Even if there were complicity from the Democratic side the voting records and the Congress records are a mother load of information on an Ideological Policy that can and should not exist in a Free and Democratic Government, even covering the Economics of the Capitalism that was set forth, showing up, not just recently as in yesterday, but right along.

But this is more about what many should be bringing in to the public discussion, especially those who would be freshmen/women in the Congressional Races.

This is, once again and the list is so long, about what the previous 109th Congress didn’t do, nor care about, as they were beating the drums of war, their claim to a strong national security, and they with their surrogates were calling us, who were warning them and the majority of this country what was coming, across the whole spectrum, every childish and treasonous name they could muster in their double speak of hypocrisy, lies, and propaganda!

In February 2007, William Winkenwerder Jr. announced he was stepping down from his post as assistant secretary of defense for health affairs following a press conference in which he downplayed the Walter Reed scandal as a mere “quality-of-life experience.” In the months that followed, it seemed clear that Winkenwerder’s negligence may have been partly to blame for the deplorable conditions at the military hospital. Now, more than a year and half after his departure, Winkenwerder’s legacy lives on in a multibillion-dollar Defense Department medical-records management system that many military doctors believe is fatally flawed. One military physician, speaking anonymously, calls it “another Walter Reed-type scandal.”

He goes on to explain the Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application, or AHLTA, that begin in 1997. Who got the contract for it, complaints about it etc..

The military stuck with the system until November 2005, when Winkenwerder, who oversaw all DOD health care, held a press conference rechristening the system “AHLTA.” “We have put a new name on what we are doing because it is not a ‘version two’ of anything, but an entirely new system,” he said. But AHLTA was CHCS II, warts and all-and a new name couldn’t hide the program’s problems.

Over the course of AHLTA’s implementation period, which has continued through this year, military doctors have grown increasingly disgruntled with the system. They complain that AHLTA is difficult to use, error prone, and slow, and that it has too many nonsensical tics such as an inability to capture patient data unless the patient stays in a hospital overnight.

More about the failings but also about the success of a program that the VA had already been using for the past 25yrs. and integration problems of this new system with the old and who suffers from the many problems.

And here’s the key to their failed ideology and policies:

But Winkenwerder championed the private-sector solution. Like many Bush administration appointees, Winkenwerder was plucked from industry. An MD/MBA, he never served in the military and was a vice president of Blue Cross Blue Shield, New England’s largest private health insurer, before arriving at the DOD. Winkenwerder was proud of his corporate pedigree: During his nomination process, he told the Senate that “coming from the private sector, I am…confident in the ability of private health care contractors to [provide]…high quality services.” (Winkenwerder did not respond to an interview request.)

Right, and we’ve been watching how the once  World Envied Private Sector, businesses and workers, often knocking heads but moving forward with the best in modern innovations and technologies for an advanced society that this planet has experienced in a long time, has sunk to it’s own corruption, greed, arrogance, self indulgence, apathy, false superiority,……………………………………………………………, the list is just to long, but a total lack of common sense, critical thought and extremely bad business practices should be added.

It isn’t about pride of innovation nor quality products it’s about wealth and the road to easy money garnered off the backs of the working masses who still try and get a pride and self worth out of what they do.

The AHLTA debacle hasn’t come cheap. So far the Pentagon has invested an estimated $5 billion of taxpayer money in the project. This figure includes the original Integic contract and other corporate handouts such as a $67.7 million follow-up contract for “monitoring” and “management” with Northrop Grumman-which bought out Integic shortly before AHLTA was announced-and another $12.3 million to Northrop and Booz Allen Hamilton for aid in assessing how AHLTA and VistA can share data.

We’re talking about the so called false impression given of a Strong National Security by a group of, so many names and descriptive words come to mind, extremely incompetent fools, who Never seem to give a crap about anyone but those in their circles, even than turning on the ones who get caught in their web of greed and corruption, using that phrase “Strong On National Security and Defense” to only enhance their power and greed on their Use of those they send into Wars of Choice and the long running Destructive Occupations than Short Change Them when they return. These War of Choice only helping to create a Weak National Security so they can use that as their excuse for the continuation of Perpetual Conflict and Criminal Terrorism!

Niko Karvounis has more, with important backlinks, that should be read, But I’ll place a couple of more cuts of thought:

But making these systems interoperable will come at enormous taxpayer expense: Casscells says the price tag for convergence will be another $15 billion over the next several years, putting the total cost of AHLTA somewhere in the realm of $20 billion-four times what the government had originally budgeted for the entire AHLTA process. “There’s been plenty of blame to go around,” Casscells said at a forum on military health care last month. “Nobody’s gonna like it.”

Privatization, ain’t it great, especially when nobody complains, and those that do are marginalized on the extreme!

For his part, Winkenwerder, who boasted that the system “works” and “is improving care” in an October 2007 interview, is still touting the success of AHLTA. His profile at Deloitte Consulting, where he serves as a senior adviser, proudly claims that he oversaw “the world’s…most sophisticated electronic health record system.”

But that’s what this society and it’s modern capitalist ideology is all about, not what you know, but who you know, and how to pad your resumes with lies, but if you know the right folks, Who Cares!!!!