We've read and heard a lot about the Phoenix VA scandal during the last eight months. The stories make your blood boil and your heart break. But what we've learned this week makes me want to throw up.
While Sharon Helman's patients were buried on secret wait lists, with many veterans dying there, the now-fired Phoenix VA director and her family of seven were getting the VIP treatment at Disneyland and Universal Studios - and you paid for all of it.
You paid for the Helman clan's eight-day, run-of-the-park, $11,000 vacation last February -- just two months before the VA scandal broke in Phoenix. Her sugar daddy: A lobbyist whose D.C. firm has hauled in millions of your tax dollars from federal contracts.
You also ate the $729 bill for Helman and her daughters' tickets to Beyonce's Phoenix concert last year, courtesy of the same lobbyist. "What a memory!" Helman gushed in an email to VA staffers.
Those weren't the only "memories" you paid for: There was that trip to Sedona, plane tickets here and there, and who-the-heck-knows what else. All gratis from the same lobbyist, who was Helman's corporate godfather during her rapid rise through the VA ranks.
The Arizona Republic's Dennis Wagner, who has broken the major stories on the scandal, has all the sickening details here.
The Helman kleptocracy is coming to light now after a judge this week upheld her firing by the VA for taking all those freebies without ever disclosing them. She was nailed for old-fashioned, beak-dipping, palm-greasing corruption -- not for the misconduct we've been reporting on for months.
Chief Administrative Judge Stephen C. Mish said the Department of Veterans Affairs failed to make the legal case that its own inspector general had made before Helman was fired in November. Mish said higher-ups should have known why patient care was being delayed.
But the judge left little doubt Helman knew how she got to Disneyland:
"I conclude the appellant's offenses are serious and more likely than not intentional. I conclude (Helman) has little rehabilitative potential."
Thanks for the memories. Urp.
