During my fifteen years of experience with the large health-care system, I witnessed shocking knee-jerk responses to political and media attention placed upon medical facilities during times of unsolicited adversity. It saddens me that physicians and other dedicated employees, many of us Veterans, become targets or scapegoats for many facility political and media inquiries.

Unfortunately, the large health-care system is not a popular health-care organization in the eyes of the media and politicians. Political and media scrutiny abounds often resulting in defamation of character of dedicated employees working against enormous obstacles to improve patient health-care. Subsequently, instead of supporting the medical staff, facility leaders choose to place undeserved blame on an unsuspecting employee in a retaliatory approach. I became one of those employees. What tends to follow next is "nit-picking" of every chart, every decision, and every action by the physician. Worse yet, governing oversight agencies investigate complaints by politicians and others, interview health-care facility leaders, and end up making decisions based upon testimonies filled with lies. The investigators fail to check facts. They ignore certainties that would damage the facility's reputation. Testimonies by deceitful executive leaders prevail, and their perjured statements blindside truthful testimonies by clinical staff. By choosing to ignore dependable evidence, health-care suffers, and worse yet, people die.

This is a true story about politicians, a large health-care system, coercion, and how unsolicited political pressure placed upon physicians can thwart efforts to apply opioid safety initiatives in America leading to unintentional drug overdoses and death.