Jacksonville VA Canceled Nearly 60,000 Veterans' Health Appointments

Aside from the powerful head of the House Veterans Affairs Committee is from Florida, Jeff Miller has been just one in a very long line of politicians blaming the VA at the same time making promises to fix it.

How can they fix it when so many of their buddies want to kill the VA and send veterans to private, for profit doctors and hospitals? After all, it aside from being the right thing to do, fixing the VA would actually save money however veterans are not as powerful as wealthy donors to their reelection campaigns.

Don't they know veterans have been suffering for decades while politicians make speeches?


Jacksonville VA canceled nearly 60,000 veterans' health appointments in 14-month span
Jacksonville.com
By Clifford Davis
Apr 3, 2015

Out of 117,117 canceled appointments from Jan 1, 2014, to March 1, 2015, the clinic canceled 59,661 of them, according to data provided by the VA through a Freedom of Information Act request made by the Times-Union.

In February, the assistant director of the North Florida/South Georgia VA Health System pointed to canceled appointments as a contributing factor in the Jacksonville clinic’s wait times, which are the worst for any major VA facility in the country.

What Nick Ross failed to mention was that the clinic — not patients — was responsible for canceling more than half of those appointments.

“We have a fairly high number of folks who either cancel their appointment or no-show, this accounting system really doesn’t take that into effect because it’s cumulative,” Ross said when presented with Jacksonville’s wait times.

Then, as now, roughly a quarter of veterans at the Jacksonville clinic don’t get seen within the VA’s 30-day target, more than seven percent higher any other major facility in the nation. “If you take that into account, technically speaking, we can’t do anything about that.”

The numbers tell another story.
read more here