Troubles for veterans went on for years at VA

VA rule changes eliminated thousands of veterans from waiting lists
Tampa Bay Times
William R. Levesque Times Staff Writer
Sunday, June 22, 2014

The computer scheduling program created in 2002 was supposed to allow the Department of Veterans Affairs to identify veterans who had waited the longest for medical care.

Officials called it the Electronic Wait List, or EWL. VA employees were told to put new patients with severe medical disabilities linked to their military service on the list after they had waited more than 30 days for an appointment. That way, these veterans could be identified for faster medical care.

Eventually, most new VA patients, service-connected disability or not, went on the waiting list after 30 days.

But about 2010, the VA allowed its hospitals to lengthen to 120 days the time veterans must wait without an appointment before they are put on the waiting list, potentially cutting thousands of veterans across the nation from the list, according to a Tampa Bay Times review of VA records and interviews.

The time frame is now 90 days.

Some critics say the changes were a deliberate ploy by VA leaders to make this much-watched measure of hospital performance look better than it actually was.

"This looks to me like just one more of the VA's gaming strategies that have been identified in the last year," said Anthony Hardie, a Bradenton resident who is on the board of directors of Veterans for Common Sense, a nonprofit advocacy group. "It looks like VA leaders simply gave up on trying to fix the problem."
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Veterans Affairs Watchdog Downplayed Medical Care Problems, Probe Finds
Report Claims Legitimate Whistleblowers' Critiques Were Ignored
Wall Street Journal
Michael M. Phillips and Ben Kesling
June 23, 2014

WASHINGTON—A Department of Veterans Affairs internal watchdog created to safeguard the medical care provided to former service members instead routinely played down the effect of treatment errors and appointment delays, a federal special counsel alleged Monday.

In a letter to President Barack Obama, U.S. Special Counsel Carolyn Lerner said the VA Office of the Medical Inspector has repeatedly undermined legitimate whistleblowers by confirming their allegations of wrongdoing, but dismissing them as having no impact on patient care.

The strongly worded critique adds a new layer to the veterans-care scandal that has rocked the VA and the Obama administration in recent months.

Among the cases that whistleblowers reported to the special counsel:

A veteran wasn't given his first comprehensive psychiatric evaluation until he had spent eight years as a resident of a Brockton, Mass., VA psychiatric unit, in 2011.

Drinking water at the VA facility in Grand Junction, Colo., was tainted with elevated levels of Legionella bacteria, which can cause a form of pneumonia, and standard maintenance and cleaning procedures weren't performed.
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