this. de wenter says till now, she was simply too scared to come forward. the truth is, she is scared. my life will change after this comes out. i will have people at work who are not going to like me because of what i ve done. i ll have other people at work who say thank you for doing what you ve done. drew, i mean she s scared. he s incredibly brave to come forward. the most startling allegation in this report is that till very recently someone has still been trying to hide the actual number of vets who the died. did you get any response from the v.a. that could explain that? not really. we got a generic response that says the new exacting secretary at the v.a. is saying we must work together to fix the unacceptable systemic problems in accessing v.a. health care. and that the v.a. is taking action to accelerate access to care and reach out to veterans to get them off the wait lists and clinics. you re right.
reporter: and you re making basically those triage decisions. yes. reporter: so, you re bumping one veteran for the other, based on who s the sickest. yeah. reporter: a spokesperson for the veterans administration refused to respond to the specifics of this report and would only say that as acting secretary, sloan gibson has said in va facilities around the country, we must work together to fix the unacceptable, systemic problems in accessing va health care. that includes getting veterans off wait lists. carol, we believe the information is in the hands of the office of inspector general. we re not sure if the fbi has that information, but as she says, she believes there is a cover-up still taking place there. and just watching her, pauline, she s clearly emotionally distraught. what might happen to her? she s very scared. she was very reluctant to do
republicans and democrats, unanimous, stopping this bonus structure for three years. and i just saw an article where the acting secretary, sloan gibson, was speaking to members of the va and said that our insistence upon stopping the bonuses is a bunch of crap. i would defer, i would absolutely say the american people are serious about this and so is the congress and this is going to have to be drilled into and drilled down until we root out the bad actors and stop incentivizing them. the more i hear about this va scandal and the mushrooming effect of it is based on lies, made up facts, imaginary wait times, wait lists, including soldiers who are waiting to die, the more i begin to think maybe the va can t be fixed, maybe it is time to shut it down. what do you think? i ll tell you this, i said this last week to the va and the inspector general, and taking the jurisdiction of the
new records show the va at the center of this growing scandal shelled out millions of dollars in bonuses over the past three years. investigative reporter robert o dell and craig harris breaking that story as they have so many others. robert, you first, what was going on here and why were they getting the bonuses? they were getting the bonuses in part for meeting these wait time goals that they had. but part of the way they were meeting those goals was to put patience on wait lists and not give patients timely appointments. so one of the things we did was we asked started asking three months ago are well, give us the bonus payments for at the phoenix va and we had to really fight we had to fight for three months to get the payments and finally got them late on friday night and we were able to crunch them yesterday. craig, crunch away. what were some of the payments? some of the payments they
it is a very interesting story out of pittsburgh. congressman tim murphy who is a republican who is a democrat were contacted by the pittsburgh va. they were doing an audit to find out about these wait lists. these wait lists called near lists on which people are put on the list to try to get health care and they never get off the wait list and never get that appointment. it comes down to the fact that the head of the pittsburgh va told the two congressman that she had known about the fact that the wait list had almost 700 people on it but the national va told her not to share that information with area members of congress. the congressmen are very upset. a guy named gary with the