VA fires 4 senior executives in scandal response.

[Man from Pickens]

4. The primary issue is fraud

People in the system lied to get bonuses that were offered to them. Their responsibility - one for which they were being paid - was to report the truth, whether it was for good or for ill. If the truth was that they couldn't serve veterans in a reasonable amount of time for lack of resources, then that's what needs to be reported. What should absolutely not happen is to pretend that veterans were well served while actually dropping them into a black hole where they would never get the care they deserve. How were we to hold Congress accountable for lack of funding when the people running the system were deliberately hiding the effects thereof?

Above all things, democracy requires that the public gets the information we need to make decisions about who among our representatives is serving us well and not so well. By hiding the information, these VA officials wrongly took that decision out of our hands, and are thus the primary ones to blame for the situation.