For years, staff in the VA hospitals spoke up about the wait times, but the administration silenced the whistleblowers. Now the Office of Special Council, a federal department that protects whistleblowers, is investigating 37 instances in which the VA potentially muzzled staff raising concerns about the system. The New York Times reported how VA hospital administrators at an Alaskan hospital placed one of their urologists on administrative leave and ordered security to escort her out of the hospital when she said the wait lists amounted to medical fraud in 2008. But Acting Secretary of Veterans Affairs Sloan Gibson denied the wait-time scandal warranted any firings to clean the house. “This idea that, let’s fire everybody, let’s pull everybody’s bonus away, that’s a bunch of crap,” he said. Firing incompetent and dishonest employees is a bunch of crap? And yet the VA found it worthy to punish the whistleblowers. Something’s amiss. More…