September 11, 2007
Buyer: poor management a cause of excessive waiting times for VA health care
Washington D.C. — Responding to a Department of Veterans’ Affairs (VA) inspector general report that VA has overstated its success in promptly scheduling health care appointments, Veterans’ Committee Ranking Member Steve Buyer (R-Ind.), today called on VA’s new health under secretary, Michael Kussman, M.D., to quickly identify the scope and cause of the problem and implement solutions to guarantee veterans prompt access to care.
“The department has long held up its ability to schedule patients promptly as evidence of sound management,” Buyer said of VA’s previous claims that it schedules over 90 percent of appointments within 30 days of a patient’s requested date. “Now VA’s own IG states that the health care administration’s performance is far below that. Dr. Kussman is now in charge of the health care system. He has my confidence that he will go to the root of the problem, which I expect is largely one of management, and bring about change quickly. If the standard is to provide an appointment in 30 days, for example, then VA must provide an appointment in 30 days.”
The IG found that only 75 percent of veterans received appointments within 30 days. The worst waiting times are in VA medical facilities in Columbia, S.C. (64 percent meet the 30-day goal), and in Chillicothe, Ohio (also 64 percent). Detroit veterans experience the best performance; 84 percent get appointments within 30 days. Kussman has said that he will seek expertise from an outside contractor to determine the scope and cause of the problem.
According to the IG report, VA policy is to schedule all veterans within 120 days of their desired date. VA also must schedule veterans with service-connected disability ratings of 50 percent of higher and all veterans needing care for service-connected disabilities within 30 days of their desired date. Over a quarter of severely disabled veterans did not get appointments within those standards. In one case, a severely disabled veteran waited 259 days for an appointment; facility personnel told IG examiners the patient “fell through the cracks.”
“For over a decade, Congress has authorized VA billions of dollars more than it requested, largely to improve access, as well as to ensure quality and expand certain services, such as mental health care,” Buyer said. “I have long held that good management is the key to VA’s access issues, not ‘more money’, as we so often hear. When a severely disabled veteran waits nine months for an appointment because he ‘fell through the cracks’, that is grossly unacceptable.”
The report also indicated that VA officials understated the department’s waiting list for health care appointments by 53,000. In 2003, excessive waiting times prompted then-VA Secretary Anthony Principi to suspend enrollments of new priority group 8 veterans – those with no service-connected injuries or illnesses and with higher incomes.
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