Thousands of combat veterans are still waiting to learn if they will receive health care benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs, but the agency is refusing to answer Congress’s questions about the backlog.
The waiting list includes nearly 2,000 applications that are sitting at just one office in Atlanta, but that the VA refuses to acknowledge as actual applications, according to an agency whistleblower.
Scott Davis, a program specialist at the Health Eligibility Center in Atlanta, said the VA is attempting to downplay the number of veterans waiting to be enrolled by ignoring the fact that those 1,833 veterans already applied.
Instead, he said, the agency plans to send out letters asking them to apply again in a poorly-timed outreach campaign set for the week of Thanksgiving.
“VA should have processed these applications, and this is how the backlog gets started,” Davis told the Washington Examiner. “These applications sit and sit and sit.”
“If you’re not enrolled, you cannot get an appointment,” he added. “They’re acting as if it’s the veterans’ burden to correct this issue.”
Davis noted the agency has refused to change the way it handles applications from combat veterans, even after a waiting list of 34,000 applications was exposed in July.
“The significance is that VA still is not paying attention to combat veteran applications for healthcare from Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said. “You would think that the recent exposure from the media would have made them more aware.”
Rep. Jeff Miller, chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, asked the VA on Nov. 2 to provide the committee with a list of combat veterans on the health care enrollment waiting list.
Although the VA was supposed to provide the list by Nov. 13, it had not done so a week later, a committee aide confirmed.
The massive backlog of enrollment applications masked the fact that one third of veterans waiting for their benefits died before the VA got around to looking at their information. Lawmakers are also probing those numbers, which were confirmed by an inspector general’s report in September.
An apparent glitch in the VA’s enrollment system continues to keep at least 29,000 combat veterans in an enrollment limbo, the VA told the Examiner Friday.
While combat veterans are supposed to be automatically eligible for health care benefits and therefore not required to submit information about their income, thousands of applications filed by those veterans have been set aside because they don’t include income information.
Combat veterans’ automatic eligibility expires after five years. In some cases, veterans applied for health care benefits well within the five-year window, but saw their eligibility for benefits disappear after the VA sat on their applications.
A VA spokesman said the agency doesn’t have the legal authority to enroll veterans in the system automatically. The agency denied the income verification problem was an “error” in its system, claiming the process is “operating as it was designed.”
“We have been working to refine and get better data to help enroll Veterans and to keep their records updated,” said Walinda West, VA spokesperson. “We have publicly acknowledged that our enrollment data integrity and quality is in need of significant improvement; to that end, we have worked hard over the past year to address those issues.”
The VA issued a “change order,” or a request to fix the process so the means test no longer hampered combat veterans’ applications, on July 13.
But Davis said the agency has allowed the change order to languish since then, declining to approve it despite public scrutiny of the backlog.
Miller said the VA’s failure to fix the application process is “either blatant incompetence or cold-hearted indifference.”
“The law hasn’t required a means test from recent combat veterans since 2008, yet VA still hasn’t come up with an efficient way to enroll these veterans in its health care system without one,” Miller said.
“Clearly it’s past time for some adult leadership at VA’s Health Eligibility Center,” he added. “In the meantime, VA must be open and honest with the public about the steps it is taking to solve this problem and hold the responsible employees accountable.”
