8 years later, VA is still fudging wait times on vet care
This month marked eight years since the Phoenix Veterans Affairs scandal came to light. The public found out the VA was keeping secret wait lists of veterans who needed care, covering up the extended waits for appointments. A number of veterans died while waiting for care.
Troublingly, not much has changed since then.
The VA continues to use misleading and inconsistent data that artificially reduce reported wait times that veterans face in accessing critical health care services. This effort to conceal the obvious – that the VA is failing to provide timely care to some veterans – prevents veterans from getting referred out to non-VA doctors as provided for under the VA MISSION Act.
The VA isn’t just playing games with numbers; it’s playing with veterans’ lives.
In November 2021, the VA’s acting undersecretary for health suggested my organization, Americans for Prosperity Foundation, was misleading veterans when we revealed the VA was using inaccurate wait-time numbers to avoid giving veterans the legally required option to receive health care in the community when facing delays at the VA.
But now the VA admits the wait-time data it relies on is insufficient and needs fixing. In a recent hearing before the House Appropriations Committee, VA Secretary Denis McDonough promised changes to how the VA calculates wait times, admitting he was “frustrated with it myself.”
This preemptive damage control was in response to the VA internal watchdog’s imminent release of a management advisory detailing how the VA uses different methods for calculating wait times that causes confusion and inaccuracies.
The VA Office of Inspector General reported the VA’s Access to Care website improperly calculates wait times for new patients and, although the agency knew about these inaccuracies as far back as 2019, still no concrete action has been taken to remedy the situation.
The OIG also found inaccurate or misleading wait-time data in a widely covered 2019 VA-authored study published in JAMA Network Open. That study allegedly found wait times at VA hospitals to be shorter than in private hospitals.
The JAMA study claimed to rely on data measuring wait times from the date a veteran requested an appointment, but the OIG concluded the authors actually used a different start time that could be significantly later than the literal request date. According to the OIG, one top VA official admitted the JAMA “study was flawed.”
The misinformation has even extended to congressional testimony.
The OIG report uncovered that Veterans Health Administration’s then-Executive in Charge Dr. Richard Stone relied on improper data in a 2019 hearing before the House Veterans Affairs Committee to claim the VA was complying with the access standards for the Veteran Community Care Program under the VA MISSION Act.
And despite telling Congress it intends to address the wait-time issue, the VA continues to stonewall requests for records about wait times. Americans for Prosperity Foundation filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests with the VA for email communications about wait times nearly a year ago, but the VA has not provided a single email to date.
How the VA calculates wait times goes far beyond the accuracy of articles in academic journals and testimony to Congress. The wait-time calculation determines what medical options are available to veterans seeking care. Their lives are very much on the line. It is unacceptable that eight years after the Phoenix scandal the VA continues to rely on inaccurate data that denies care to veterans and misleads the public while blaming critics and stonewalling document requests. The VA admits it has problems and our veterans deserve a VA that is willing to fix them.