Over the past month, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has been under investigation over allegations of extensive wait times for appointments and the falsification of records at VA clinics across the country.
The VA is responsible for handling medical care, benefits, burials and memorials of America’s veterans. Once a veteran has received their discharge papers, known as a DD214, he or she must enroll in the VA system by calling in, making an appointment or applying online. New patients are supposed to have an appointment within 14 days of enrolling, and existing patients are supposed to see a doctor within 14 to 30 days after requesting an appointment. But this isn’t the case at many VA clinics.
Reports of problems in the VA and calls for reform have been going on for years, but the recent scandal first broke in late April when Dr. Sam Foote, a retired VA physician, came forward in an interview with CNN that employees at a VA hospital in Phoenix kept a secret waiting list to make it seem like patients were receiving care sooner than they actually were.
“The scheme was deliberately put in place to avoid the VA’s own internal rules,” Foote told CNN. “They enter information into the computer and do a screen capture hard copy printout. They then do not save what was put into the computer so there’s no record that you were ever here. That hard copy, if you will, that has the patient demographic information is then taken and placed onto a secret electronic waiting list, and then the data that is on that paper is shredded. So the only record that you have ever been there requesting care was on that secret list. And they wouldn’t take you off that secret list until you had an appointment time that was less than 14 days so it would give the appearance that they were improving greatly the waiting times, when in fact they were not.”
These allegations were confirmed by the VA Inspector General, whose report revealed that 1,700 patients at the VA Phoenix office waited an average 115 days for an appointment, nearly four times as long as the maximum wait time. Some veterans have died while waiting for care, though the Inspector General has not yet officially concluded that the delay caused death.
After these allegations surfaced, now former Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki called for a review of all VA offices. According to Washington Post, a clinic in Fort Collins, Colorado, instructed its clerks to falsify documents so it would seem as if physicians were seeing fourteen patients a day. Gross mismanagement of the gastroenterology program at the Dorn VA Medical Center in Columbia, South Carolina, caused a backlog of 3,800 appointments. 52 patients associated with these delays had cancer.
Again, these issues are not new. Robert Petzel, the VA’s top official for health affairs who resigned early last month, testified that he knew VA health clinics were using inappropriate scheduling procedures as early as 2010.
This past Friday, President Obama accepted Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki’s resignation. Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs Sloan Gibson will replace Shinseki until a permanent appointment can be made.
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