I have an assignment for our crack veterans affairs correspondent Bob Rosebrock:
Find out the precise fabric and texture of the three-cornered relationship among the noted Middle Western neurosurgeon Stephen Ondra, Medtronic, the world’s largest medical technology company, and the VA, where Doc Ondra has been serving the past 18 months as the senior policy advisor for health affairs.
There is a creeping suspicion in Congress that Doc Wink-Wink may be shlepping simultaneously down both sides of the ethical boulevard, still playing consulting ball with the rich boys at Minneapolis-based Medtronic while cunningly working his day job to the max for the VA.
The odor of rats is beginning to cloud the room.
You may recall this is how the worldwide financial failures began to unravel — when the boys in the industry got too cozy with Washington, silently segueing into government, and continuing their sleight-of-financial-hand without missing a note.
What Have We Here?
Just before Doc Wink-Wink supposedly left Medtronic for keeps in July 2008, 10 months before landing the plum posting in the Obama administration, the boys at Medtronic paid him a cool $3.6 million in royalties from spine-surgery instrument sales. Doc Wink-Wink also was working his fleeting fingers in other channels, among them an outfit known as Linden Consulting LLC, which was worthy pocket change, another $265,468, at least.
Reportedly this handy instant largesse of almost $4 million obliged Mrs. Doc Wink-Wink to abruptly cancel a month-long yard sale she had scheduled to help the Wink-Winks and their three daughters over the hump down home in Illinois.
That our favorite Down by the Doc is a party animal is undeniable. A slick multi-tasker, the brainy brain surgeon lives by a mantra encased on his favorite green wall at home, “I Always Have Time for a Democrat, Even in Mid-Surgery.”
During the Obama campaign, between and among brain surgeries, Doc Wink-Wink took time out of his busy holdup schedule 48 times to donate his hard-earned dough, mostly but not entirely to Swish, and also to fellow but not fallow Chicagoans. He even found time to wire a gift to the Nevada Democrat party.
Oops, Did I Err Again?
Living in such a whirlwind, he could be pardoned for occasionally mistakenly removing a knee instead of a brain.
“I’ll get back to you at the first opportunity,” a grateful Swishie told Doc Wink-Wink before and after his election. The payoff for Doc Wink-Wink came 100 days after Swish’s inauguration when he won the plush VA posting.
Bill Hawkins, the creative CEO of Medtronic, had plugged hard for Doc Wink-Wink’s appointment. Unless you are really slow, Billy Boy’s motivation was to give Medtronic a direct line into the White House.
If you think that Doc Wink-Wink, who pocketed a nifty $3.6 million for merely six months’ worth of toil and trouble before “leaving” (titter-titter) Medtronic in the middle of the Obama campaign, has severed his intimate relations with Medtronic because of joining the VA, you, dear reader, are naïve.
The good news is that Wink-Wink is being investigated by the No. 1 medical watchdog in Congress. The debilitating news is that Wink-Wink and his boss are telling the prober, Sen. Charles Grassley, to go pound sand.
As the ranking member of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Grassley (R-Iowa), regarded as a thorn by many in the healthcare community because of his relentless vigilance, has been chasing Doc Wink-Wink and his VA boss Eric Shinseki for months, with minimal success.
Sen. Grassley suspects but cannot (yet?) prove that Doc Wink-Wink has been sneakily snuggling under the cashmere blankets with the open-wallet boys at Medtronic ever since President Obama paid off one of his campaign donors.
When he isn’t performing brain surgery, Doc Wink-Wink, rated the equal of Mother Teresa by those who know him, is spiking his numerous bank accounts by “consulting” with the big boys. Mama, don’t let your boys grow up to be cowboys. Force them to be “consultants.”
My guess is that when Doc Wink-Wink isn’t performing brain surgery — which would be 100 percent of the time these days — he is performing questionably ethical holdups, unless these shadowy appearances and appurtenances are deceiving.
Doc Wink-Wink is so darned distracted with his consulting jobs that he has been known to hand a pair of rusty, busted Walmart scissors to his trusted assistant and say, “You take her brains out — I have a date.”
How do we know any of this?
I stumbled across the story on page A32 of yesterday’s always hostile Los Angeles Titanic.
This immediately sounded an alarm.
Page A32 means the story either is embarrassing to the left wing or important to normal people or both.
Doc Wink-Wink and the Titanic both bill and coo out on the left wing.
The Titanic’s tinderbox temper is taunted further by the notion that a bulldogging Republican, Sen. Grassley, is at the helm of the investigation.
Naturally, the Titanic story includes the obligatory smarmy line in the fifth paragraph — what else could you expect from Republicans?, the reporter asks baldly. Sen. Grassley’s probe telegraphs a scary message to the boys on the left wing: Here Come the Republicans in the new Congress that convenes five weeks from today.
Fasten your seatbelts, Titanic reporters. The aggressive new Republican majority in Washington may mean you libs are on a rocky road. And we ain’t talking ice cream.
