Veterans Affairs

More than 6 mil­lion ap­point­ments are cur­rently sched­uled at Vet­er­ans Af­fairs fa­cil­it­ies across the coun­try, ac­cord­ing to an audit re­leased Monday. Though 96% of those are set to take place in the next 30 days, new pa­tients of­ten wait weeks or months for a first ap­point­ment. An­oth­er 57,436 new pa­tients have waited more than 90 days to sched­ule ap­point­ments, and 63,869 who en­rolled in the sys­tem over the last dec­ade ...

Wait­ing times for care at the ma­jor­ity of the 216 VA fa­cil­it­ies ex­amined ap­peared to be ma­nip­u­lated, ac­cord­ing to an audit re­leased by the White House. That audit fol­lowed an­oth­er pre­lim­in­ary re­port, re­leased earli­er this week, that showed the agency’s prob­lems were wide­spread.

An in­vest­ig­a­tion of wait times for med­ic­al care at Vet­er­ans Af­fairs fa­cil­it­ies has found “in­ap­pro­pri­ate schedul­ing prac­tices are sys­tem­ic” through the VA and “in­stances of ma­nip­u­la­tion of VA data that dis­tort the le­git­im­acy of re­por­ted wait­ing times,” prompt­ing new calls for VA Sec­ret­ary Eric Shin­seki to resign. The VA in­spect­or gen­er­al’s re­port, re­leased Wed­nes­day, shows that the in­vest­ig­a­tion has ex­pan­ded to 42 fa­cil­it­ies, more than a dozen more than the ...