Anyone who has been a homeless Veteran knows about the “monkey trail”. In Washington, D.C. there’s a comparable occurrence. It’s the never ending flow of bureaucrats from 810 Vermont Ave. NW to Capitol Hill and back.

One key difference between these groups is that the homeless Veteran has nothing to carry and the VA bureaucrat has another bureaucrat carrying their water.

Lately, many of these bureaucrats have been trudging up the Hill to tell “outraged” politicians that the VA has hired gazillions of mental health professionals to help alleviate the non-existent Veterans suicide epidemic.

What the bureaucrats don’t tell and what the politicians don’t ask is how many of the existing mental health professionals are quitting the VA in droves, or are being fired or forced into “early retirement”.

The reason for this is simple. They do this because if people knew the truth they would be outraged and demand accountability. They don’t like accountability. Accountability is hard. Feigning outrage is easy, and it plays well on TV.

However, some people are doing some research at websites like http://www.fedscope.opm.gov/index.asp

And an interesting thing shows up in the statistics. An example is the 4^th quarter of FY08. In that quarter the VHA had 8,049 accessions and 4,865 separations during that quarter.

Net result = 3,184 new people. The VA won’t tell you that though. They just talk about the accessions.

The end strength reported for 4Q FY08 in VHA is 233,274. Ira Katz claims that 17,000 of those are mental health professionals. He also claims that the mental health professionals group consists of: “part-time psychiatrists, part-time psychologists, social workers, mental health nurses, counselors, rehabilitation specialists, and other clinicians.”

Why doesn’t he mention residents? Anyone who has been a victim of VA healthcare knows that the vast majority of the experimentation done on Veterans is done by residents.

The majority of the time that the part-time psychiatrists and psychologists spend is on the supervision of these residents.

Is the term “other clinicians” a codeword for resident? We think it is.

Bottom Line? The VA is engaging in fuzzy math tactics to alleviate the intense scrutiny that would come from honesty and forthrightness.

The unobfuscated truth is that only seven percent of VHA employees are “mental health professionals”.

It is reasonable to conclude that there are at least 1 million Veterans seeking mental health treatment through the VA. That is twenty percent of enrolled Veterans. Logic would suggest that seven percent of employees dedicated to twenty percent of the “population” is a woefully inadequate response.

O! Wait. We forgot.

“I disagree with the premise that there was some effort to cover something up,” Kussman testified Thursday. “We don’t obfuscate.”

Silly me! The VA doesn’t obfuscate.