Veterans Affairs purged thousands of medical tests to 'game' its backlog stats
Thousands of orders for diagnostic medical tests have been purged en masse by the Department of Veterans Affairs to make it appear its decade-long backlog is being eliminated, according to documents obtained by the Washington Examiner.About 40,000 appointments were “administratively closed” in Los Angeles, and another 13,000 were cancelled in Dallas in 2012.
That means the patients did not receive the tests or treatment that had been ordered, but rather the orders for the follow-up procedures were simply deleted from the agency’s records.It is not known how widespread the practice is, or how many veterans hospitals have mass-purged appointment orders to clear their backlogs.
Alas, this feels all too familiar to someone who grew up with Britain’s National Health Service.
Here’s the thing: when one subordinates healthcare to government, one inevitably gets all of the usual government games. A favorite trick: Mrs. Jones needs a hip replacement, so she calls up her local NHS hospital to arrange it; the NHS tells Mrs. Jones that she should call back in a given amount of time, after which she will be treated within 24 or 48 or 72 hours — or however long the government has promised would elapse between “phone call” and “treatment”; Mrs. Jones waits the requisite amount of time, then calls, then gets her appointment; the state then says semi-truthfully that Mrs. Jones was given a hip replacement “quickly” and that the gap between her requesting the treatment and her receiving the treatment was short. Now, did Mrs. Jones actually get her hip replacement “quickly”? Of course not. She waited both the amount of time that the government recorded and the amount of time that it did not. But who cares? All that matters when the government is elected or fired based on its performance running the health system is what the government is able to say about how it is running the health system. So it lies its damn head off.
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