Saturday, April 11, 2015

Veterans Administration still dysfunctional in spite of $16.3 billion in more money. Government run health care inefficiency on display.

Obama Fails Vets: VA Wait Lists As Bad As Ever


Accountability: A year ago, the VA scandal involving extreme wait times and cover-ups broke. President Obama pledged urgent reforms, and Congress gave him billions to fund them. But so far, nothing's changed.
On April 9, 2014, the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs announced its findings that several veterans had died waiting for treatment at the Phoenix VA Health Care System and that the organization had kept two sets of books to conceal the long waits.
Over time, the scandal spread, as chronic, systemic delays and attempts to hide them at other VA clinics came to light. By August, the head of the VA was canned, and Congress rushed through a $16.3 billion bill to fix the problem.
The day Obama signed that bill into law, he talked about how his administration was "moving ahead with urgent reforms," and "instituting a critical culture of accountability" at the VA.
He said that the administration was getting 215,000 vets off wait lists, the funding bill would "give the VA more of the resources that it needs" and the new law would let vets who couldn't get timely care through the VA "get the care they need someplace else."
Problem solved, right?
Not even close. Obama — and the mainstream press — may have moved on, but the VA that he promised to fix is as bad as ever.
An investigation by the Associated Press published this week found that "the number of patients facing long waits at VA facilities has not dropped at all." Not. At. All.
It found that the number of vets waiting between 30 and 60 days hasn't changed and that the number waiting more than 90 days to get an appointment "has nearly doubled."
From last August through this February, the AP found, 1 in 36 patients had to wait more than a month before getting an appointment with a doctor.
And those numbers don't count the veterans who simply gave up waiting or went elsewhere.
The AP also found that the Choice program that Obama touted "has barely gotten off the ground" and that few vets understand how it works.
How about that accountability Obama promised?
This week, House Veterans' Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller complained, "The VA's chief problem — a widespread lack of accountability among failed employees — is as prevalent today as it was a year ago."
He noted, "Not a single VA senior executive has been fired for wait time issues."
The Washington Examiner provides more evidence of Obama's failure to change the VA's culture.
One of the investigators whom Secretary Robert McDonald tapped to look into a case of medical negligence at a VA clinic, Deborah Amdur, was herself caught lying to Congress about a scandal at the VA facility she directed in Vermont.
"If the Department of Veterans Affairs is serious about cleaning up its own affairs," the Examiner said in an editorial, "it should not put liars in charge of investigating its own shortcomings."
As to that promise of "urgent reforms," Secretary McDonald is now urging only patience as the VA slogs along at adding new capacity and dithers over making needed reforms.
Of course, anyone who thought that tossing billions more dollars into the VA system would solve anything hadn't looked at the numbers.
As IBD reported last year, health spending at the VA climbed 193% between 2000 and 2013, while the number of veterans served went up just 68%.
Obama promised vets that he'd use the extra $16.3 billion that Congress gave him to give vets the health care they deserve. In a speech to the American Legion a few weeks after signing the VA funding bill, he told vets, "We are going to fix what is wrong. We're going to do right by you."
Veterans should demand to know when Obama intends to live up to that promise.

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