Watchdog: 900,000 vets may have pending health care requests
WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly 900,000 military veterans have officially pending applications for health care from the Department of Veterans Affairs, the department’s inspector general said Wednesday, but “serious” problems with enrollment data make it impossible to determine how many veterans were actively seeking VA health care.
About one-third of the 867,000 veterans with pending applications are likely deceased, the report says, adding that “data limitations” prevent investigators from determining how many now-deceased veterans applied for health care benefits or when. The applications go back nearly two decades, and officials said some applicants may have died years ago.
More than half the applications listed as pending as of last year do not have application dates, and investigators “could not reliably determine how many records were associated with actual applications for enrollment” in VA health care, the report said.
The report also says VA workers incorrectly marked thousands of unprocessed health-care applications as completed and may have deleted 10,000 or more electronic “transactions” over the past five years.
Linda Halliday, the VA’s acting inspector general, said the agency’s Health Eligibility Center “has not effectively managed its business processes to ensure the consistent creation and maintenance of essential data” and recommended a multi-year plan to improve accuracy and usefulness of agency records.
Halliday’s report came in response to a whistleblower who said more than 200,000 veterans with pending applications for VA health care were likely deceased.
More than 300,000 dead vets still on VA’s active health care enrollment list
More than 300,000 dead veterans are still listed in VA computers as actively trying to sign up for health care — part of a massive 860,000-claim backlog that hasn’t been cleared up, according to an audit Wednesday that portrayed a department struggling with the basics of tracking benefits.
Veterans Affairs workers appear to have deleted another 10,000 benefit applications without ever processing them, and 13 percent on the rolls have been awaiting a decision for more than five years, the department’s inspector general said.
Many of those have died, but the VA never went back to delete their names, leaving a system so messy that the department can’t properly triage cases and figure out who needs help the most urgently, investigators said.
“Overstated pending enrollment records create unnecessary difficulty and confusion in identifying and assisting veterans with the most urgent need for health care enrollment,” the investigators said in the report. “Additionally, outreach efforts to obtain additional information for enrollment eligibility may have been frustrating and upsetting to family members of deceased veterans.”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/sep/2/300k-dead-vets-va-health-care-enrollment-list/
