Big, burly Edward Derwinski with his signature crew cut is not ideally suited for slipping into buildings incognito.
But as secretary of veterans' affairs, he successfully launched dozens of what he dubbed "surprise raids." He would appear at VA hospitals under an assumed identity feigning sickness in order to size up the quality of unrehearsed, routine caregiving.One Saturday afternoon, for example, he walked into a VA hospital emergency room and complained of chest pains. To his horror, Derwinski was kept waiting an hour before being offered medical care - a potentially lethal lapse of time in actual cardiac cases. Derwinski delivered a dressing down to the hospital's administration the following Monday.
When he wasn't snooping, Derwinski was squeezing three consecutive billion-dollar increases for the VA budget by appealing directly to the president. He delivered for vets. But he became persona non grata the day he proposed opening up underutilized veteran hospitals to poor nonvets, prompting the Veterans of Foreign War to withhold a coveted endorsement of President Bush last month.
Seeking to recapture a core Republican constituency, the White House sacked Derwinski days later in what many regard as transparent pandering to one of the most spoiled special interests in Washington. Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., for example, scorns the VFW and others as "professional fund-raising veterans" whose "demands are insatiable - they're never satisfied."
Derwinski's political point of no return was proposing a pilot program in August 1991 aimed at rationalizing, and ultimately preserving, the separateness of the VA health-care system. Two under-utilized VA hospitals in Alabama and Virginia would have been slated to treat non-veterans in communities of rural poor.
Veterans still would have enjoyed priority treatment, and the cost of treating nonvets would have been footed by the Department of Health and Human Services, not the VA. However, veterans' groups viewed this as a slippery slope, the undercutting of the sanctity of the VA health-care system.
Some longtime VA observers believe that the VFW has turned a relatively benign initiative into a fund-raising bonanza. "At every opportunity the service organizations (like the VFW) will rally and cry wolf that their benefits are being taken away," said one high-level VA official. "There is this cry that benefits will be taken away, and people join and membership goes up and the mythical threat never materializes, and they say see, we protected you."
Without the snooping cabinet secretary, the 172 VA hospitals can lower their vigilance and remove the "WANTED" posters bearing Derwinski's picture. There will be no more "surprise raids" from the big man.