Last year, while everyone was making important and necessary noise about the Veterans Administration Wait-List scandal, a separate Inspector General’s report was not getting any press at all. This separate investigation revealed that the V.A. medical center in Tomah, Wisconsin had been prescribing, in some cases, lethal doses of pain killers
M.D. Kittle at Wisconsin Watchdog has been reporting on this story as well as its relation to the dismissal of Baldwin’s Deputy State Director Marquette Baylor.
Baylor was let go after investigative reports broke in early January about the Tomah V.A. medical center’s pain-killer prescribing practices, now alleged to have led to the deaths of three veterans.
Baldwin’s office, according to reports, did nothing with an inspector general’s report last year detailing the concerns, and refused to act when a whistleblower reportedly begged Baldwin’s office to do something.Baldwin’s office is obviously in deep but could someone else know about those findings before they became public?
The original report, published in January 2015 by the Chicago Tribune, is dated March 2014; a month before regular reporting began on the V.A. Wait list scandal.
That scandal presented a significant burden to Democrats running for office but Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin was not running for re-election. She was, however, the chair of the Women’s Senate Network (WSN).
The role of the WSN is to get Democrat women elected to the US Senate. In 2014 there was an added emphasis on electing women and keeping the Democrat majority. So the question that comes to my mind is this; would the addition of the Tomah VA scandal have made Baldwin’s job as the chair of the WSN more difficult?
If her office did choose not to act on the report for political reasons is that a decision she’d have made on her own or would she have engaged her peers?
She had plenty of peers. Three of the Democrat women she was trying to assist were Senators Kay Hagen, Mary Landrieu, and Jeanne Shaheen. And according to USA Today there were “a tight-knit group of Democratic female senators who are not up for re-election this year but who are still smack dab in the middle of a campaign — a national crusade to keep women in the Senate and in leadership.”
When it came to helping candidates like Alison Lundergan Grimes, Cincinatti.com reports that everyone (Senate Democrat women) were sharing cell phone numbers, strategy and tactics.
So imagine if you will…
Democrat women candidates have to win to hold the Democrat majority in the Senate. The endless parade of White House scandals has handicapped those efforts. The Obama-Care roll out in late 2013 was a disaster, followed by the VA wait-list scandal. About the same time another report hits Tammy Baldwin’s office about vets dying from painkiller overdoses prescribed at a V.A. Hospital in her political backyard.
The wait-list scandal has sensitized the country to problems at V.A. hospitals across the nation. Senator Baldwin’s constituent services staff in Wisconsin is getting an increasing number of emails and phone calls. Baldwin’s Deputy State Director, Marquette Baylor is confronted with what amounts to “broad-scale misconduct” at multiple V.A. centers” and her efforts to run this up the chain of command is met with resistance or ignored.
The same month Marquette Baylor is looking for guidance another Tomah vet dies of an overdose but still no action from the Senator’s office.
A few months later Baldwin’s Chief of staff flies out to fire Marquette Baylor in early 2015 for no apparent reason, with an over-generous severance package in hand. Baylor declines the offer and every one lawyers up.
On Monday April 20th Baylor filed an ethics complaint against Baldwin.
No one outside Baldwin’s office is yet implicated but wouldn’t it be crazy to think that a junior senator managed all of that on her own, during a critical election year, without any guidance from anyone outside her office, given her position and contacts?
There is clearly a good deal yet for Wisconsin Watchdog and M.D. Kittle to report, and I look forward to reading more, but I felt compelled to ask questions about this timeline given the contacts and association of Senator Baldwin. I’d also like to leave you with this, from USA Today.
“It just seemed like whenever we were nearing gridlock, there was one of my female colleagues who saved the day,” Baldwin said.
… Baldwin said she and her female colleagues take a very measured, thoughtful approach and draw upon natural instincts as “protectors … whether its economic protection or making sure that children are safe and getting what they need to survive and thrive.”
Are there children who would be safer had their family members not died as a result of being over-prescribed pain killers at the Tomah, Wisconsin V.A. Medial Center?
