Professor Michael J. Mann, MD, is a cardiothoracic surgeon and an innovator of genetic and molecular therapies and diagnostics for thoracic and cardiovascular disease. He joined the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 2003, having received an A.B. (summa cum laude) in synthetic chemistry from Princeton University and an M.D. from Stanford University. Dr. Mann completed his General Surgery residency at Harvard Medical School/Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he also served on the Faculty of Cardiovascular
Medicine, and subsequently completed his fellowship in Cardiothoracic Surgery at UCSF. He has been named to the U.S. News and World Report list of “Top Doctors” in the United States. Dr. Mann’s basic science and translational clinical research has been published in world-leading journals such as The Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Read more about the author
Veterans are among our greatest heroes. After willingly putting their lives on the line, these men and women have been promised access to at least the same quality healthcare that most Americans enjoy. The United States Department of Veterans Affairs, with a system of 168 medical centers and a total of more than 1,700 sites of care, is charged with fulfilling that promise. It has an annual budget of roughly $59 billion, employs more than 25,000 doctors, and serves some 9 million veterans each year.
But what happens when a government agency intended to look after its country’s former soldiers is rife with systemic dysfunction and indifference?
Americans were shocked in 2014 by deadly delays in care at VA facilities throughout the US. Even worse, administrators were not only aware of the delays, but also illegally disguising them in pursuit of financial gain. But what if the Wait List Scandal was merely the tip of an ugly iceberg of abuse and neglect to which veterans are routinely subjected within the Veterans Health Administration? In Mission Betrayed, Professor Michael J. Mann, MD, unabashedly chronicles the unnecessary suffering, at times to the point of death, inflicted upon American veterans even after
they access a system propped up on intentionally misleading statistics of “quality of care” – statistics that even instigate the denial of life-saving surgery to sick vets. Drawing on real-life stories of veterans who have been needlessly harmed or killed, Mission Betrayed exposes medical and administrative VA practices that reveal the public outrage to date to be focused on a small facet of an enormous, seething crisis.
