A CNN report alleges that veterans seeking medical care at the VA's Phoenix, AZ facility were instead placed on secretive waiting lists, languishing and in some cases dying as the agency and bureaucrats withheld treatment for months. According to a VA whistleblower, the delays were designed to make it appear as thought the VA center in Phoenix was cutting through its backlog quicker than it really was.
At least 40 U.S. veterans died waiting for appointments at the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care system, many of whom were placed on a secret waiting list.
The secret list was part of an elaborate scheme designed by Veterans Affairs managers in Phoenix who were trying to hide that 1,400 to 1,600 sick veterans were forced to wait months to see a doctor, according to a recently retired top VA doctor and several high-level sources.
Internal e-mails obtained by CNN show that top management at the VA hospital in Arizona knew about the practice and even defended it.
Dr. Sam Foote just retired after spending 24 years with the VA system in Phoenix. The veteran doctor told CNN in an exclusive interview that the Phoenix VA works off two lists for patient appointments:
There's an "official" list that's shared with officials in Washington and shows the VA has been providing timely appointments, which Foote calls a sham list. And then there's the real list that's hidden from outsiders, where wait times can last more than a year.
According to Foote, the elaborate scheme in Phoenix involved shredding evidence to hide the long list of veterans waiting for appointments and care. Officials at the VA, Foote says, instructed their staff to not actually make doctor's appointments for veterans within the computer system.
Instead, Foote says, when a veteran comes in seeking an appointment, "they enter information into the computer and do a screen capture hard copy printout. They then do not save what was put into the computer so there's no record that you were ever here," he said.
According to Foote, the information was gathered on the secret electronic list and then the information that would show when veterans first began waiting for an appointment was actually destroyed.
"That hard copy, if you will, that has the patient demographic information is then taken and placed onto a secret electronic waiting list, and then the data that is on that paper is shredded," Foote said.
"So the only record that you have ever been there requesting care was on that secret list," he said. "And they wouldn't take you off that secret list until you had an appointment time that was less than 14 days so it would give the appearance that they were improving greatly the waiting times, when in fact they were not.".
While the problem of lengthy waits and delays at Veterans Affairs facilities throughout the USA is nothing new, the reports out of Phoenix are among the first by a former VA official to suggest that the prolonged waits are by design.
An outspoken critic of the Iraq campaign during the Bush administration, retired General Eric Shinseki was appointed head of the Veterans Affairs by President Obama in January 2009. However, under Shinseki's tenure, wait times have increased due to delays and red tape involving simple medical procedures. However, the VA claims that the backlog has been reduced by 44% over the last year.
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