A fatal wait: Veterans languish and die on a VA hospital's secret list

[Anti Federalist]

Socialized medicine, coming soon for all of us.

They care about the troops, except when they don't.

Not intentionally malevolent.


A fatal wait: Veterans languish and die on a VA hospital's secret list

http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/23/health/veterans-dying-health-care-delays/

(CNN) -- 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.

For six months, CNN has been reporting on extended delays in health care appointments suffered by veterans across the country and who died while waiting for appointments and care. But the new revelations about the Phoenix VA are perhaps the most disturbing and striking to come to light thus far.

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.

 

[tod evans]

Say it isn't so....

 

[Brian4Liberty]

Medical care is efficient in USSA, comrades.

 

[kcchiefs6465]

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."


Foote estimates right now the number of veterans waiting on the "secret list" to see a primary care physician is somewhere between 1,400 and 1,600.

"I feel very sorry for the people who work at the Phoenix VA," said Foote. "They're all frustrated. They're all upset. They all wish they could leave 'cause they know what they're doing is wrong.

"But they have families, they have mortgages and if they speak out or say anything to anybody about it, they will be fired and they know that." [Oh, the irony-- KC]

Several other high-level VA staff confirmed Foote's description to CNN and confirmed this is exactly how the secret list works in Phoenix.

Foote says the Phoenix wait times reported back to Washington were entirely fictitious. "So then when they did that, they would report to Washington, 'Oh yeah. We're makin' our appointments within -- within 10 days, within the 14-day frame,' when in reality it had been six, nine, in some cases 21 months," he said.

In the case of 71-year-old Navy veteran Thomas Breen, the wait on the secret list ended much sooner.

"We had noticed that he started to have bleeding in his urine," said Teddy Barnes-Breen, his son. "So I was like, 'Listen, we gotta get you to the doctor.' "

Teddy says his Brooklyn-raised father was so proud of his military service that he would go nowhere but the VA for treatment. On September 28, 2013, with blood in his urine and a history of cancer, Teddy and his wife, Sally, rushed his father to the Phoenix VA emergency room, where he was examined and sent home to wait.

"They wrote on his chart that it was urgent," said Sally, her father-in-law's main caretaker. The family has obtained the chart from the VA that clearly states the "urgency" as "one week" for Breen to see a primary care doctor or at least a urologist, for the concerns about the blood in the urine.

"And they sent him home," says Teddy, incredulously.

Sally and Teddy say Thomas Breen was given an appointment with a rheumatologist to look at his prosthetic leg but was given no appointment for the main reason he went in.

The Breens wait ... and wait ... and wait ...

No one called from the VA with a primary care appointment. Sally says she and her father-in-law called "numerous times" in an effort to try to get an urgent appointment for him. She says the response they got was less than helpful.

"Well, you know, we have other patients that are critical as well," Sally says she was told. "It's a seven-month waiting list. And you're gonna have to have patience."

Sally says she kept calling, day after day, from late September to October. She kept up the calls through November. But then she no longer had reason to call.

Thomas Breen died on November 30. The death certificate shows that he died from Stage 4 bladder cancer. Months after the initial visit, Sally says she finally did get a call.

"They called me December 6. He's dead already."

Sally says the VA official told her, "We finally have that appointment. We have a primary for him.' I said, 'Really, you're a little too late, sweetheart.' "

At the end is when he suffered. He screamed. He cried.

Sally Brenn on the death of her father-in-law

Sally says her father-in-law realized toward the end he was not getting the care he needed.

"At the end is when he suffered. He screamed. He cried. And that's somethin' I'd never seen him do before, was cry. Never. Never. He cried in the kitchen right here. 'Don't let me die.' "

Teddy added his father said: "Why is this happening to me? Why won't anybody help me?"

Teddy added: "They didn't do the right thing." Sally said: "No. They neglected Pop."

What token response am I to look for? "Freedom", I suppose.

 

[Paulbot99]

Bastards. Hits way too close to home for me.

 

[Anti Federalist]

What token response am I to look for? "Freedom", I suppose.

Nah, no flippant one word smart ass comment does this any justice.

And if he had gone down there and demanded something be done for, had gotten loud and combative at the medical fascists killing him through neglect, the cops would have shown up, and saved him the pain of dying from cancer.

"I feel very sorry for the people who work at the Phoenix VA," said Foote. "They're all frustrated. They're all upset. They all wish they could leave 'cause they know what they're doing is wrong.

"But they have families, they have mortgages and if they speak out or say anything to anybody about it, they will be fired and they know that."

Just doing my job.

 

[kcchiefs6465]

Nah, no flippant one word smart ass comment does this any justice.

And if he had gone down there and demanded something be done for, had gotten loud and combative at the medical fascists killing him through neglect, the cops would have shown up, and saved him the pain of dying from cancer.

Just doing my job.

I'll offend many but I could not give a fuck less: Build them all a memorial.

The police who would have killed him if he so much as lifted a cane, the bureaucrats whose families would starve absent their utterly worthless job and lack of conscience; him.

Give them all medals. Maybe they'd perpetuate this system for a while longer, speak fondly of and accept invitations for ceremonial awards.

I ought shut the fuck up. It's amazing to me though.

My remarks aren't from callousness, I just cannot believe. Propaganda is of no little order. Of all the legless, mentally affected, melted, absent adequate, if any care, that this guy insisted only for the VA to provide care... I just don't know what to say. That was what my "freedom" was in regards to.

 

[AuH20]

They had a contract with these men. These aren't optional conditions.

 

[kcchiefs6465]

They had a contract with these men. These aren't optional conditions.

"They" ought to be in a prison cell.

 

[AuH20]

"They" ought to be in a prison cell.

We get it. You hate all the military. Granted, there are is sizable share of glory seekers and sociopaths, but not everyone is a criminal.

 

[kcchiefs6465]

We get it. You hate all the military. Granted, there are is sizable share of glory seekers and sociopaths, but not everyone is a criminal.

My "they" was in reference to who you claim the military has a contract with. It wasn't a reference towards the men and women who make up the military.

What I was referring to in the "they" was the politicians, ambassadors, lobbyists, etc. who had a stake to claim with getting the military involved within various conflicts. I was also more referring to bankers, certain corporate CEOs, and the recycling of "public" agents to "private."

Claiming I hate the military because it falls short of the neocon-istic dreams of global hegemony (much to be said on why you said it) is rather lacking in any basis whatsoever. Do I hate the military for wishing to bring them all home? Do I hate the military for wishing, mainly, their highers who were aware of war crimes be prosecuted?

What ought I say?

 

[AuH20]

My "they" was in reference to who you claim the military has a contract with. It wasn't a reference towards the men and women who make up the military.

What I was referring to in the "they" was the politicians, ambassadors, lobbyists, etc. who had a stake to claim with getting the military involved within various conflicts. I was also more referring to bankers, certain corporate CEOs, and the recycling of "public" agents to "private."

Claiming I hate the military falls short of the neocon-istic dreams of global hegemony (much to be said on why you said it). It's rather lacking in any basis whatsoever. Do I hate the military for wishing to bring them all home? Do I hate the military for wishing, mainly, their highers who were aware of war crimes be prosecuted?

I apologize. I thought you were talking about the troops. The troops are certainly open for criticism, but I think they are the ones being sold the raw deal.

 

[Mani]

So caring about the troops is more than putting on a bumper sticker or a ribbon?

I don't understand...I thought that's what it means...


Man...this as depressing as it gets....

No one gives a fuck about the troops. They were used and thrown away...literally some of them are lying rotting in a dump heap somewhere. The rest are alive but rotting in their homes waiting for the govmt to take care of them.

Sickening.

I bet MANY 3rd world countries are more efficient than this.

 

[idiom]

Obamacare is not socialized medicine. The VA is. Obamacare is asset stripping.

It can work quite well as a saftey net, but not anything more than that.

 

[jclay2]

I could have sworn the libs used the VA as a reason for single payer.

 

[Brian4Liberty]

 

[donnay]

Death panels.

 

[Lucille]

Guess who else got a bonus:

What could be worse than tax delinquent employees at the IRS getting big performance bonuses? How about the director of the VA hospital in Phoenix getting a $9,000 bonus after at least forty military vets died waiting for treatment at her facility… a horror kept secret by deleting their names out of the hospital database?

News of the bonus comes from the Washington Free Beacon: “Last year, Sharon Helman, the director of the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care System, got a $9,345 bonus, in addition to her annual base salary of $169,900. Overall, leadership at the hospital was paid more than $700,000 in taxpayer money, according to publicly available salary data.”

 

[Pericles]

Death panels.

At the VA it is called hospice. One of my buddies was told he had at most 6 months (cancer) and he wasn't dying fast enough, so they put him on the hospice program after 8 months, and the hospice kept giving him fatal combinations of medications which his buddies (including myself) intercepted before he got stupid and took something he shouldn't. He was still alive 18 months after the diagnosis, with not much in the way of tumor growth, and we had finally gotten them to relent and do radiation on the two tumors.

He got pneumonia, and instead of antibiotics, the hospice gave him a strong narcotic, that in a weakened state, finally killed him.

 

[donnay]

At the VA is is called hospice. One of my buddies was told he had at most 6 months (cancer) and he wasn't dying fast enough, so they put him on the hospice program after 8 months, and the hospice kept giving him fatal combinations of medications which his buddies (including myself) intercepted before he got stupid and took something he shouldn't. He was still alive 18 months after the diagnosis, with not much in the way of tumor growth, and we had finally gotten them to relent and do radiation on the two tumors.

He got pneumonia, and instead of antibiotics, the hospice gave him a strong narcotic, that in a weakened state, finally killed him.

I am so sorry for your loss. That just breaks my heart. They did the exact same thing to my father. My father was a Korean War Veteran.

It is disgusting how they treat the veterans. They treat dogs and cats better in this country.