Wisconsin VA "Breeding Drug Addicts" Instead of Healing Veterans?

You know it is really bad when the Wisconsin VA gets called "Candy Land" because of the drugs they have been handing out. This is from NBC News.

"I just feel that he didn't have a chance," Simcakoski's mother, Linda, told Farrow. "We trusted them and we expected them to know what to do...and it just seems like they just kept giving him more and more."

A Wisconsin VA hospital nicknamed "Candy Land" by some for an alarming surge in pain-killer prescriptions is under investigation — six months after a Marine Corps veteran died of an overdose in the psychiatric ward.

The amount of opiates doled out by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs Medical Center in Tomah nearly quadrupled over eight years, under the leadership of the chief of staff, Dr. David Houlihan, as the non-profit Center for Investigative Reporting first revealed.

Prescriptions for just one of them, often-abused oxycodone, shot up ten-fold — from about 78,000 pills in 2005 to almost 712,000 in 2012, the center found.

Meanwhile, some staffers complained they were pressured to refill prescriptions early and to keep giving powerful narcotics to patients who may not have been taking the doses themselves.

"They're breeding drug addicts," Jason Bishop, an Air Force veteran who is a patient at the Tomah facility, told MSNBC's Ronan Farrow, who reported this story in collaboration with NBC Investigations.

The problem is, some member of Congress will jump on this story and write a bill with his name on it or some other veteran who tried to get help only to end up in the grave.

Why not? They've gotten away with it all these years. The reports go back to at least 2008 on what the VA has been doing with handing out drugs instead of therapy. Some find it all too easy to numb them instead of work with them. Others, well, they do the best they can but even the best VA doctors are overwhelmed by the number of veterans looking for help to heal.

If you are thinking that veterans would be better off outside the VA, think again. Years ago I work for a group of psychiatrists and they made a lot more money with med appointments than they did providing actual therapy sessions. These appointments were done in 15 minutes meaning they could see at least 4 patients an hour every hour they were in the office. When they needed time off, appointments had to be changed. I had to do the med appointments first and then squeeze everyone else in afterwards.

So why is it still this way after all these years of sad outcomes? Drugs aren't free and someone is making money off the veterans who fought to retain the freedom we still have. The other reason is that members of congress are "doing something" about all this without a clue as to what that something actually should be.