The Department of Veteran’s Affairs (VA) is still experiencing severe problems, including exorbitant waiting times for patients despite available medical appointments.
According to The Washington Examiner, there are hundreds of thousands of VA patients who have to wait over a month for an appointment:
VA documents also show there are currently 184,520 veterans across the nation waiting longer than 30 days for an appointment and more than 45,000 new veteran patients waiting more than 90 days. Internal VA documents also indicate 479,239 veterans nationwide are waiting for physician requested follow-up appointments over 30 days for the period July to September 2017.
You would think that given such wait times, the VA would be flooded with appointments. But only slightly more than half of available appointments were used in the VA:
In Iowa, the VA’s clinic utilization averaged just over 41 percent while between ten to twelve thousand appointments remained unfilled each of those months. Even while thousands of appointments remained unused, there were 1,291 veterans waiting more than 30 days for an appointment and at least 82 waiting longer than 90 days.
Similarly, the Phoenix VA facility, which was the epicenter of VA’s wait time scandal that became public in 2014 and where at least 293 veterans died while waiting for care, has 3,338 veterans waiting more than 30 days for an appointment, while only 55.4 percent of appointments were utilized.
In other words, the VA could cut down significantly on the number of veterans forced to wait for unreasonable amounts of time for care.
The VA has been mired in problems for years. Among the scandals were reports that the agency put veterans on “secret lists” to make it appear that waiting times were on the decline, while VA executives would reward themselves with handsome bonuses, despite veterans languishing without care.
A 2015 Inspector General (IG) report stated that the VA’s problems were “systemic”; clearly such systemic problems still exist in the agency. David Shulkin, the new VA secretary, has done some good work in his efforts to reform the agency, but more work is needed to ensure that our nation’s veterans are able to receive the care they need.
Pete Hegseth, a veteran and Fox News contributor, explained in a PragerU video that the VA’s problems ultimately stem from the fact that it’s a single-payer system. The best course of action, he suggested, would be to replace the system with vouchers that veterans can use to purchase the health care of their choice.