VA whistleblower reveals agency’s massive neglect of applications
It’s been about a year since President Obama signed a $16 billion bill that was supposed to fix the broken Veterans Affairs health care system.
He promised we were going to see an end to the “outrageous” and “inexcusable” stories of veterans left to die on secret lists waiting for doctors’ appointments.
But now a VA whistleblower has come forward to warn that nothing has changed – and that things are about to get a whole lot worse.
Because the VA may be engaged right now in a shameful plan that could keep hundreds of thousands of veterans and their families from getting the coverage and care they’ve earned.
And that could include you or someone you love.
Dying in limboAll the talk about how our politicians are fixing the VA system was a bit too much for Scott Davis to handle.
After all, he’s a man who knows the truth.
Davis works at the VA Health Eligibility Center in Atlanta. And last month he leaked to the media and Congress the real number of veterans who died waiting for their VA benefits.
It was nearly a quarter million. Enough to fill six Major League baseball stadiums.
You see, Davis and his team performed a secret analysis – one that the public was never supposed to see – of the massive backlog of 847,000 veterans still waiting to receive VA health care coverage.
And 238,000 of them had died on the waiting list (in some cases years ago) never getting the benefits or the care that had been promised to them.
It’s enough to make you sick. And, tragically, it looks like it’s not about to stop.
Because instead of working to get coverage for the remaining 600,000 veterans on the waiting list, the VA system is orchestrating scandalous attempts to purge as many of them as it can from the system. All without giving them a thing.
Just consider the evidence:
- VA officials are trying to pass a rule that would allow them to toss your application in the trash if you don’t quickly respond to a single mailing – even though they know their database is filled with bad addresses.
- More than 16,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan just had their VA applications expire, Davis said, after the agency failed to act. These veterans had been guaranteed five years of VA eligibility and instead were left scrambling for health care.
- Another 35,000 combat veterans with pending applications are being denied coverage thanks to a computer glitch the VA is aware of – and still isn’t fixing!
Of course, the bureaucrats at the VA have found a convenient way to help themselves sleep at night. One of their spokespeople claims that many of those people on the waiting list – including some who died – may have been able to get other coverage through Medicare, Medicaid or private insurance.
But that’s hardly the point, is it? Davis says the VA makes the system deliberately cumbersome, fully expecting that veterans and their families will have to go elsewhere.
It’s what Congressman John Kline of Minnesota – a 25-year Marine Corps veteran married to a retired Army nurse – calls a “bungled bureaucracy operating under little transparency and less accountability.”
That actually sounds like our entire government, doesn’t it?
Fortunately, there are two things you can do right now:
- Contact your members of Congress and tell them to pass the VA Accountability Act (H.R. 1994), which would make it easier to fire incompetent VA employees denying our veterans care.
- If you or someone you love is having trouble dealing with the VA system, you can cut those paper pushers right out of the loop. Send your complaint directly to the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs or the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.
They have staff who can help cut through the miles of hoops and red tape. And it’s time they started working for us.
Sources:
“Leaked document: Nearly one-third of 847,000 veterans with pending applications for VA health care already died” Ryan Grim, Jennifer Bendery, July 15, 2015, The Huffington Post, huffingtonpost.com
