WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of veterans seeking health care but ending up on waiting lists of one month or more is 50 percent higher now than it was a year ago when a scandal over false records and long wait times wracked the Department of Veterans Affairs, The New York Times reported.
The VA also faces a budget shortfall of nearly $3 billion, the Times reported in a story posted online ahead of its Sunday editions. The agency is considering furloughs, hiring freezes and other significant moves to reduce the gap, the newspaper reported.
In the last year, the VA has increased capacity by more than 7 million patient visits per year, double what officials originally thought they needed to fix shortcomings, the Times reported. However, the newspaper added, department officials did not anticipate just how much physician workloads and demand from veterans would continue to soar. At some major veterans hospitals, demand was up by one-fifth, the paper reported.
Citing interviews with department officials and internal department budget documents it had obtained, the Times reported that doctors and nurses have handled 2.7 million more appointments than in any previous year, while authorizing 900,000 additional patients to see outside physicians.
The Times also reported intense internal debate at the VA over a proposal to address a shortage of funds for a new, more effective but more costly hepatitis C treatment by possibly rationing new treatments among veterans. Certain patients who have advanced terminal diseases or suffer from a “persistent vegetative state or advanced dementia” would be excluded under that plan, the paper reported.
Agency officials expect to petition Congress this week to allow them to shift money into programs running short of cash, according to the newspaper. However, lawmakers may object to removing funds from a new program intended to allow certain veterans on waiting lists and in rural areas to choose taxpayer-paid care from private doctors outside the department’s health system, the Times reported.
“Something has to give,” the department’s deputy secretary, Sloan D. Gibson, said in an interview with the newspaper. “We can’t leave this as the status quo. We are not meeting the needs of veterans, and veterans are signaling that to us by coming in for additional care, and we can’t deliver it as timely as we want to.”
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And the first salvo for privatizing the VA is officially launched.
Gosh, so they can’t massively expand services to meet soaring demand without spending a lot of money. Color me surprised. I’m sure that the republican congress will be forthcoming with the needed funds since they’re so big on “supporting the troops”. Any moment now…
Does that mean that workloads soared because the VA was finally accurately reporting the figures on the wait times. That would seem to intellectually follow if the VA was so horribly reporting the number of people waiting for a month or longer. That conclusion would follow naturally if the statistics were incorrectly reported, but now they are accurately reported. Then it would seem that the lie that this was the doings of rogue people on the scheduling assembly line, but that the management was totally unaware of the issue.
It an accurate conclusion from these facts one can safely conclude from events over the last year that, despite the sound and fury by the President and Congress replacing the Secretary of the VA, it really was more of a middle management problem. So, one is safe in concluding that nothing occurred that changed anything with making veterans wait so long that they die before receiving treatment.
Furthermore, no nothing contained in the report indicates any effort by the VA in clearing the backlog of veteran benefit cases. Clearing the runaround that veterans receive in benefits adjudications of their files. Many (and I do mean many) of the applications for benefits stretch back to the Vietnam war.
No, from the viewpoint of veterans, nothing has changed. The same old stalling tactics suffered by veterans harken back to the conclusion that nothing has changed at the VA.