A new report from the Department of Veterans Affairs office of Inspector General revealed that 307,000 American veterans have died waiting the Veterans affairs administration to approve their medical care.
The report confirms the worst-case scenarios about the long VA wait times that have made news reports and sparked questions in Congress since last year.
On Wednesday, the OIG revealed that of the 800,000-some records stalled in the VA’s health care enrollment system, 307,000 veterans have already died anywhere from months ago to more than four years ago.
“As of September 2014, more than 307,000 pending [enrollment system] records, or about 35 percent of all pending records, were for individuals reported as deceased by the Social Security Administration,” the report discovered.
But even that number was disputable because the VA’s databases are in such disarray.
“[D]ue to data limitations, we could not determine specifically how many pending [enrollment system] records represent veterans who applied for health care benefits,” the report continued. “These conditions occurred because the enrollment program did not effectively define, collect, and manage enrollment data.”
Will anyone be held accountable for this? Probably not.