More than 307,000 U.S. military veterans may have died while their health care applications were stalled in a bureaucratic backlog at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), according to a report from the agency’s inspector general. There were a total of 800,000 records held up in total, some of which included requests for care that dated back years — or even decades. “People who fought, and who earned the right to VA health care, were never given VA health care,” Scott Davis, a VA program specialist, told CNN. “They literally died while waiting for VA to process their health care application.”
CNN found incidents of a veteran requesting care in 1988 that still wasn’t processed by 2014 and another whose 1998 request remained “pending” for 14 years. Staffers at the VA also incorrectly misfiled countless unprocessed applications and possibly deleted more than 10,000 care requests erroneously.
These are not all legacy cases, however. Thousands of recent veterans who did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan then returned home in need of medical treatment were stuck in limbo as well. Concerned Veterans For America CEO Pete Hegseth has loudly criticized the VA as this tragedy has come to light over the last 18 months.
”The VA’s failure to establish and enforce basic quality controls led to thousands of veterans having their benefits delayed, and, in many cases, denied,” said Hegseth in a statement. “Worse, due to the department’s abysmal record-keeping policies, we don’t even know for sure how many veterans suffered needlessly or died while waiting for care. What is clear, however, is that nearly a year and a half after the VA wait list scandal began, the VA is still struggling to provide hundreds of thousands of veterans health care in a timely and efficient manner.”
If you’re fed up with watching our veterans being kicked to the curb, please Like and Share this post on Facebook or Twitter.
