300000 Died Waiting For VA Care, Inspector General — Veterans Affairs News

“As of September 2014, more than 307,000 pending (Enrollment System) records, or about 35 percent of all pending records, were for individuals reported as deceased by the Social Security Administration”. A subsequent investigation by the department’s Office of Inspector General confirmed that some veterans had died while waiting for an appointment, but also uncovered broader problems like “unacceptable and troubling lapses in follow-up, coordination, quality, and continuity of care”.

However a report by the VA’s inspector basic says “critical” issues with enrollment knowledge make it unimaginable to find out how most of the 867,000 veterans with pending purposes have been actively looking for VA well being care.

But the findings would appear to confirm reports that first surfaced previous year that many veterans died while awaiting care, as their applications got stuck in a system that the VA has struggled to overhaul.

TJ and Allison, when it comes to getting health care for veterans, the system can be tricky and long. The VA has failed to “ensure the consistent creation and maintenance of essential data” which means in many cases it is impossible for investigators to know just how bad things are.

Even with our inability to nail down every number, we would never have known as much as we do now if not for the courage of whistleblowers in VA facilities across the country, Halliday said.

Scott Davis, a whistleblower and program specialist at the VA enrollment center in Atlanta, called the report “a step in the right direction” and said “reports like these will force the VA to change their culture”.

“The VA’s past practice of deferring to the same management officials who caused the problem…is both illogical and insulting to the veteran community”.

This story is especially important to Texas, a large and populous state with dozens of VA health facilities, including the Dallas VA Medical Center on Lancaster Road in southern Dallas. We want to get better.

Georgia’s Johnny Isakson and Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, the Republican chairman and senior Democrat, respectively, of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, rightly demanded that the VA implement the report’s recommendations to ensure “that this level of blatant mismanagement does not happen again”. In addition, the investigators were able to substantiate the claim that VA employees had incorrectly marked unprocessed applications as completed and may have deleted more than 10,000 transactions over the past 5 years.

But at this infuriating point, it would come as no surprise if Americans were soon to learn about more shocking VA health care incompetence.

Were 40,000 unprocessed applications, spanning three years, discovered in January 2013?