Fix For VA Health Snarls Veterans And Doctors In New Bureaucracy

(By Quil Lawrence, NPR News, Eric Whitney, Montana Public Radio and Michael Tomsie, WFAE for Kaiser Health News)

Veterans are still waiting to see a doctor. Two years ago, vets were waiting a long time for care at Veterans Affairs clinics. At one facility in Phoenix, for example, veterans waited on average 115 days for an appointment. Adding insult to injury, some VA schedulers were told to falsify data to make it looks like the waits weren’t that bad. The whole scandal ended up forcing the resignation of the VA secretary at the time, Eric Shinseki.

Congress and the VA came up with a fix: Veterans Choice, a $10 billion program. Veterans received a card that was supposed to allow them to see a non-VA doctor if they were either more than 40 miles away from a VA facility or they were going to have to wait longer than 30 days for a VA provider to see them. Read article here……

Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit national health policy news service that is part of the nonpartisan Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

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