Did the Department of Veterans Affairs’ own bureaucracy and internal politics lead to the huge backlog that denied many veterans care?
Officials at the VA did not advise veterans to turn in their discharge papers when applying for health care benefits, documents show.
That’s because the VA, faced with a mounting backlog of pending applications, may have sought to blame some of the delay on incomplete paperwork rather than its own failure to address the applications, a whistleblower alleged.
Scott Davis, program specialist at the VA enrollment center in Atlanta, said the agency’s enormous backlog of applications for healthcare benefits is a self-inflicted wound.
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“This is something that VA was aware of and allowed to happen,” Davis, who has repeatedly blown the whistle on misconduct at his agency, told the Washington Examiner. “They just chose to ignore it.”
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At issue is whether VA officials told veterans not to submit their DD-214 forms, or discharge papers, when filling out applications for health care benefits.
Emails obtained by the Examiner suggest the VA’s reason for avoiding the discharge papers was politically motivated.
VA officials did not return requests for comment.
In a Dec. 2013 email exchange, Lynne Harbin, deputy chief business officer of member services, discussed her intention to dodge questions posed by the American Legion about how many veterans were waiting to learn of their eligibility for VA health care.
“Note that I am skirting the issue of the numbers of pending records and instead focusing on what it means and what we are doing about it,” Harbin wrote to colleagues.
In an earlier email, Harbin expressed the VA’s need to resist asking for veterans’ discharge forms.
“Interested in hearing what the data shows, but know that politically informing veterans to give us their DD214 would be unacceptable,” Harbin wrote in a June 2012 email exchange.
A memo sent July 10, 2014 reminded VA network directors that “as a general rule, veterans will not be advised to furnish a DD-214 with their application for health benefits.”
Davis circulated documents Monday that indicated nearly one in three veterans waiting to be enrolled in the VA’s health care programs had died waiting for their benefits.
More than 238,000 veterans whose eligibility for VA benefits was pending had died, the records showed.
Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, wrote to the agency’s inspector general in September to request an investigation into allegations that thousands of veterans had died waiting for their applications to be verified.
In July of last year, Davis testified before the House Veterans Affairs Committee that the backlog of pending enrollment applications had reached 600,000.
The documents published earlier this week suggest the number has since exceeded 847,000 despite congressional and inspector general scrutiny.
“Currently, VA leadership is attempting to implement a rule change that would allow the agency to discard veteran health care applications in a pending status, if veterans do not respond to a one time letter mailing campaign,” Davis wrote in a May 8 letter to Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga.
VA officials said Tuesday they planned to implement a new policy that would require the VA to call each veteran with a pending application in addition to sending two letters. The officials said they hoped to roll out the new practice by the end of the fiscal year.
