Veterans Still Waiting Too Long for Care, Decades After Congress Promised

How many times does it have to be said that members of Congress keep making promises to fix the VA? They've been doing in since 1946 when the first House Veterans Affairs Committee took their seats and have been sitting on them ever since in more ways than the most obvious.

The veterans service organizations that make up the Independent Budget-AMVETS, Disabled American Veterans (DAV), Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA) and the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW)-last month told Congress that for FY 2003 it recommends a medical care appropriation of $24.4 billion, an increase of $3.1 billion over this year's level.

Veterans have been hearing it for years, and years, and then more years. At the same time they have been encouraged to go to the VA and file claims, the other part of the VA was not anywhere close to being able to meet the increased demand. So year after year Congress held hearings and then dropped the ball when it was in their hands to actually do the right thing.

Look what all the promises made ended up being, then remember many members of congress want the VA to be turned over to for profit operations. How can they do it? Destroy the VA first. We noticed!

Veterans still waiting for care at VA hospitals
Associated Press
John Boyle and David B. Caruso
April 9, 2015

FAYETTEVILLE – A year after Americans recoiled at new revelations that sick veterans were getting sicker while languishing on waiting lists — and months after the Department of Veterans Affairs instituted major reforms — government data show the number of patients facing long waits at VA facilities has not dropped at all.

No one expected that the VA mess could be fixed overnight. But the Associated Press has found that since the summer, the number of medical appointments delayed 30 to 90 days has largely stayed flat. The number of appointments that take longer than 90 days to complete has nearly doubled.

Nearly 894,000 appointments completed at VA medical facilities from Aug. 1 to Feb. 28 failed to meet the health system's timeliness goal, which calls for patients to be seen within 30 days.

The Associated Press figures show that from September 2014-February 2015, the Charles George VA had a monthly average of 23,544 completed visits, with 1.96 percent of those delayed at least 31 days. During that time, the local VA had a total of 97 cases delayed by more than 90 days, an average of 16 a month.

South fares poorly

Of the 75 clinics and hospitals with the highest percentage of patients waiting more than 30 days for care, 12 are in Tennessee or Kentucky, 11 are in eastern North Carolina and the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, 11 are in Georgia or southern Alabama and six are in north Florida.

Seven more were clustered in the region between Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Those 47 clinics and hospitals represent just a fraction of the more than 1,000 VA facilities nationwide, but they were responsible for more than one in five of the appointments that took longer than 60 days to complete.
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West Virginia
Clarksburg VA

Over the six-month period, nearly 13,000 of 456,800 medical appointments at VA facilities in West Virginia failed to meet the health system’s timeliness goal, which calls for patients to be seen within 30 days, according to government data reviewed by the Associated Press. The numbers include four VA medical centers and 10 outpatient centers.

About 5,700 out of 80,300 appointments, or 7.1 percent, were delayed more than 30 days at the Clarksburg VA hospital. VA medical centers in Huntington and Beckley were close to the national average. The VA hospital in Martinsburg excelled, with fewer than 1 percent of appointments delayed more than 30 days.

At the Clarksburg VA, 657 appointments stretched longer than 90 days. Only one other medical center had a higher percentage of such waits.

Maryland

Overall, veterans in Maryland faced delays of at least 31 days in obtaining 7,205 appointments at VA medical centers, according to the data, which was compiled by the Associated Press. Austin Robinson, an Army veteran, said Wednesday that he has waited as long as three months to get an appointment at the Glen Burnie clinic on Landmark Drive. Sometimes, doctors tell him to call a hotline or go to an emergency room if problems persist, and he doesn't like that. "I don't understand why it takes so long," he said as he left the clinic. "The care is pretty good. It's just getting inside to get it done. Anything can happen in three months."

Washington DC

Over 6 months at the Washington hospital, nearly 4,800 patients had to wait more than 30 days for an appointment, 700 had to wait more than 60 days and 94 had to wait more than 90 days.

Mississippi

The VA hospital in Biloxi has failed to meet goals of seeing patients within 30 days, an analysis of data provided by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs reveals.

Between September and February, 4.25 percent of patients seen -- more than 5,500 people -- had waited at least a month for care and 273 people had waited at least 90 days, according to the numbers obtained by The Associated Press.

The Biloxi hospital is not the VA system's worst offender. At the Hopkinsville VA Clinic in Kentucky, which saw 5,377 patients during that time to Biloxi's 131,219, almost 20 percent of patients waited at least a month.

Florida

Statewide, though, veterans don‘t fare as well. Florida veterans still experience some of the longest wait times in the country, with the state placing 11th for the most wait times surpassing one month and fifth for delays longer than three months, according to VA data from September to February analyzed by the Associated Press.

Ohio

In Ohio, about 4 percent of patients wait more than the 30-day limit, including those who wait up to 60 days, 90 days or even longer.

Among the worst offenders includes a clinic in Portsmouth, ranked 74th out of 940 clinics in the United States, with more than 11 percent of patients experiencing a delay of 31 days or more waiting for care.

And one more reason to not use the term PTS instead of PTSD. It actually stands for something else.

But Jones said it’s a good thing they did move because that’s when doctors discovered he had post-traumatic syringomyelia, or PTS, a rare spinal cord disease that causes the development of a cyst filled with fluid after severe spinal cord injury.

PTS can manifest for years after a traumatic injury, especially if left untreated. Potentially devastating, it can cause loss of function, chronic pain, respiratory failure and in extreme cases, death. Extremely rare, not many doctors are familiar with the disease and there are few treatment options.

Colorado

The clinic moved into a new 76,000-square-foot building in Colorado Springs in August, but its on-time performance has gotten worse. In September, nearly 8 percent of appointments were past the 30-day target. It rose to 11.6 percent in February.

The VA estimates that more than 82,000 veterans live in El Paso County, by far the most of any county in the state. Arapahoe County is second with nearly 45,000.