“If it’s happening here, it’s happening all over the country” to Veterans

Togus VA system probed over allegations of shortcuts, omissions
An October memo by a federal watchdog agency outlines allegations that, if proven, would link Maine for the first time to issues similar to those at veterans hospitals nationwide.
BY MICHAEL SHEPHERD
STAFF WRITER
November 22, 2014

TOGUS — Allegations that officials at the VA Maine Healthcare System took shortcuts and withheld information from patient files in an effort to meet national benchmarks have prompted a federal probe of services there.

While it’s not clear what impact that has on the nearly 10,000 veterans who receive treatment statewide for issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, a veterans benefits lawyer said if the claim that information was omitted from patient files is true, it would be “absolutely huge.”

GAMING THE SYSTEM?

Omissions in patient files may be the most serious allegation that drew the inspector general’s office in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to the Togus campus for an inspection of mental health services last month.

In the short term, those alleged omissions would mean that veterans may have gone without care. Long term, incomplete records could leave veterans unable to prove they’re eligible for benefits providing needed counseling. Lilly, though, said he told the inspector general’s office he had not seen evidence of “an instruction to omit things” as a strategy at Togus, and he has no proof that claims were affected.

Still, Joseph Moore, a lawyer at Bergmann and Moore, a Maryland firm handling veterans’ benefits appeals claims, said if substantiated, that claim “is absolutely huge” and would mean that “administrators got treatment providers to lie, to the obvious and direct detriment of the veterans they were treating.”

Even so, Moore and others cautioned that issues alleged at Togus are similar to VA problems nationwide, including a shortage of health professionals that the federal department’s new secretary, Robert McDonald, wants to fix.

“If it’s happening here, it’s happening all over the country,” said John Wallace, of Limestone, an Army veteran and the president of Vietnam Veterans of America in Maine.
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