Chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee Sen. Bernie Sanders appeared to tie the billionaire Koch brothers to the scandal surrounding the Department of Veterans Affairs on Friday.
The VA is investigating scheduling practices at its hospitals as part of a nationwide audit after rumors surfaced that a secret electronic wait list showed information from veterans that was entered into computers at a Phoenix VA facility but never saved. Dozens of veterans reportedly died while waiting on the fake lists.
But in an interview with The Nation’s John Nichols, Mr. Sanders argued that the scandal is due to a “concerted effort to undermine the VA,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.
“The Veterans Administration provides very high quality health care. Period,” said the Vermont independent. “It’s not perfect. It is good quality health care.”
“There is right now, as we speak, a concerted effort to undermine the VA,” he continued. “So the point is, you have government entity itself, Social Security, enormously popular, Medicare, enormously popular, Postal Service, popular, VA popular. What are the problems? The problems are — is that all of these are large, governmental institutions and you have folks out there now, Koch Brothers and others, who want to radically change the nature of society, and either make major cuts in all of these institutions, or maybe do away with them entirely.”
• Jessica Chasmar can be reached at jchasmar@washingtontimes.com.
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