WASHINGTON – Seth Moulton had earned two medals in Iraq for his valor. He’d witnessed brutal combat in four tours with the Marines. But none of that mattered when he showed up at the Veterans Health Administration hospital in Washington, D.C., where staff could not find records.
“We’ll consider taking you as a humanitarian case,” a hospital staffer told Moulton, unaware that the would-be hernia patient was also a newly elected Massachusetts congressman.
Thus began Moulton’s frustrating experience with the Veterans Affairs health system, a personal sampling of a chronically troubled medical bureaucracy that has drawn complaints from veterans, demands for improvements from Congress, and multiple investigations.
“If it wasn’t so sad, it would have been comical,” Moulton said in an interview as he recounted his VA odyssey.
n addition to enduring missing records and computer glitches, Moulton said, he was prescribed the wrong medicine, which in his case did not imperil his health but is in the category of a medical error that can be extremely dangerous in some cases, even fatal.
The VA refused to discuss Moulton’s case, citing patient privacy laws, even after Moulton gave the administration written and verbal authorization to do so.
Moulton’s encounter with the VA health system led to his first legislative initiative — a package of bills designed to strengthen training and recruitment of VA health care professionals.