Veterans Affairs officials say they are chipping away at a backlog of applications for health care, following an inspector general’s report in September that found 300,000 veterans on the eligibility waiting\u00a0list were dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson said Wednesday that VA has implemented a plan to improve its health care application system, starting with a review of more than 560,000\u00a0pending requests \u2014 from the living \u2014\u00a0including 30,000 from combat veterans who should have automatically qualified but wound up in the system because they didn’t submit income information that was not actually required.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gibson said that since Dec. 11, VA employees had <\/span>reviewed a third of the 30,000 combat veterans’\u00a0applications\u00a0and enrolled about 2,200 patients. It will continue reviewing all combat veterans’ applications and then move on to reviewing applications from every living veteran on the list, he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The overarching goals of the Veterans Enrollment Rework Project is to fix the enrollment system and enroll veterans as quickly as we can,”\u00a0Gibson said during a phone call with reporters Wednesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A VA OIG report published in September found that the VA health eligibility system contained 847,882 applications but 307,000 on the list had died,\u00a0according to the Social Security Administration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The review also found that as many as 10,000 applications may have been deleted in the past five years and veterans weren’t notified of the mistake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n VA officials said there were many deceased veterans in the system because they cannot be purged\u00a0unless the death is verified by either a death certificate, a record of death from a\u00a0VA facility or notification from the National Cemetery Administration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n VA does not accept Social Security Administration, Medicare, Defense Department or other government entity notifications as proof of death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gibson said that after VA reviews applications from living veterans, it will review\u00a0the applications of deceased veterans\u00a0to determine whether their delayed applications and lack of access to VA health care\u00a0contributed to their deaths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I want to emphasize a sincere apology\u00a0to veterans and their families. It was not right by the veterans and we were not being good stewards of taxpayer dollars,” Gibson said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Scott Davis, a VA employee and whistleblower who exposed the problems at the Health Eligibility Center in July, said he is glad to see VA has a plan to address issues but questions the department’s approach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He said VA officials could change\u00a0the policy that prevents\u00a0the combat veterans from being automatically approved, opening up health care to the\u00a030,000 waiting, and he\u00a0noted that employees who worked at the Health Eligibility Center\u00a0while the backlog rose are the same employees conducting the review.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “How can the subject of an investigation perform the duties of fixing the problem?” Davis said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He added that the bulk of applications \u2014 80 percent \u2014 originated at VA medical centers and that\u00a0reviewers at the HEC do not have access to those records.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “This is a smokescreen,” he said of the review.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Benita Miller, director of the Health Eligibility Center, was transferred last week to a lower ranking job at a regional office, according to Gibson. He said the transfer had been in the works but added it “was not a bad time to have a change in leadership at the office.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n He also promised to hold senior managers accountable if the review uncovers evidence of “misconduct or substantial mismanagement.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Davis said the transfer sends the wrong message to veterans about accountability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “It’s an insult.\u00a0This is not the type of image you want \u2014\u00a0that no matter how bad you screw up or deny veterans access to care, you still have a senior management job at VA.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Veterans Affairs officials say they are chipping away at a backlog of applications for health care, following an Inspector General’s report in September that found that 300,000 veterans on the waiting list were dead and recommended changes to the system<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":103102,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":19,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3244],"class_list":["post-68110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-veterans"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"K2463DF5NZCENLHLP43PHQD4MY","arc_canonical_url":"\/veterans\/2016\/01\/13\/va-chips-away-at-health-care-applications-eligibility-backlog-still-above-500k\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n