A Service to Veterans
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is the government agency that is largely responsible for taking care of U.S. military veterans. After serving their country, veterans deserve to be treated exceptionally and deserve to be given the help and support that they need. In recent years, however, this has not been the case. Disturbing reports of the VA failing America’s veterans have emerged repeatedly. The most well-known, and one of the most unacceptable, is probably the recent waitlist scandal in 2014.
In a Jun. 9, 2014 article, The Washington Post reported that an internal audit of the VA showed that more than 57,000 new patients had to wait a minimum of 90 days before their first appointments were made. This is not an acceptable level of care for veterans of this country. The VA has learned of, or had been forced into addressing, because of media exposure, some of the issues that were and continue to be present. The following is an excerpt of a report from the VA:
“During the course of FY 2014, VA senior leadership learned that within some of our Veterans Health Administration facilities, VA had a systemic, totally unacceptable lack of integrity. That breach of trust—which involved the tracking of patient wait times for appointments—was irresponsible, indefensible and unacceptable to the Department. Upon learning of the allegations of waiting time manipulation at three VA facilities, VA senior leadership initiated a nationwide audit of scheduling practices which, among other factors, identified several key findings: One, significant lack of clarity regarding scheduling policies and practices across our system; two, an inflexible and unrealistic 14-day standard for appointment times; three, inadequate staffing of providers and clerical support at many of the sites that were experiencing the greatest surge in patient demand and four, rigid and obsolete scheduling software.”
This helps to demonstrate the level of the issues present within the VA, as this is a report released by the VA itself which has been revealed to, at times, attempt to cover up or minimize problems and failure to meet the level of care demanded. In the same article, The Washington Post also reported that the internal audit demonstrated that 13 percent of VA schedulers were ordered to make up false appointment request dates to make it appear that the wait times were shorter than in reality. This is particularly problematic because it means that not only is the VA not meeting the standards of care expected for treating veterans, but also there is a system of covering up these failures. While the 13 percent of schedulers instructed to manipulate wait times represent a minority of the VA staff, the percentage is far too high to discount or ignore as an anomaly or isolated incident. The VA recognizing the problems is a step in the right direction, but there is much work that needs to be done. Included in the actions taken to address the report was suspending the 14-day standard and attempting to accelerate care. We have mixed feelings towards this response; on one hand, eliminating the 14-day rule should help alleviate the pressures to manipulate the wait time data, but on the other hand, it carries the possibility of lowering the standard of care for veterans.
One of the ways to accelerate care was by “significantly expanding purchased care in those markets where internal provider capacity could not meet the needs of Veterans,” according to The VA’s Affairs 2014 Performance and Accountability Report. To understand what this means, it is necessary to understand how the VA system works. The VA actually runs hospitals and care centers for the treatment of veterans across the nation. As demand for services has increased, the resources of the VA have not been able to meet the demand. The option of “purchased care” sends veterans to private health care outlets and pays for the care received by the veterans. This is a system that brings up a whole different set of issues about privatized health care, with some saying that veterans should be given more access to non-VA treatment, a case Avik Roy makes in a Forbes article titled “No, The VA Isn’t A Preview Of Obamacare—It’s Much Worse.” Separate from the issues of the ongoing discussion of privatized medicine, the VA needs to either expand its resources to take care of all veterans in a timely manner or pay for them to be treated elsewhere.
In a congressional hearing before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs on Sep. 7, 2014, the VA Acting Inspector General Richard Griffin was asked, “Would you agree that waitlists contributed to the deaths of veterans?” He answered, “Yes, they do, I would say it may have contributed to their death, but we can’t say conclusively it caused their death.” We do not wish to antagonize the VA; we believe that on the whole, the department, and this nation, genuinely try to help veterans in the best ways possible. But men and women who risked their lives to preserve the freedoms enjoyed in the U.S. deserve to have everything and anything possible done to improve the quality of their lives and to provide them with excellent health care. According to the VA website, the mission statement of the VA is “To fulfill President Lincoln’s promise ‘To care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan’ by serving and honoring the men and women who are America’s Veterans.” This promise should be fulfilled by any means necessary; brave men and women who did not let their country down must not be let down by their country. ♥