Posted on 06/25/2014 2:55:05 PM PDT by Nachum
Doctors at the Philadelphia Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Regional Office are sitting around with nothing to do, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of U.S. veterans continue to wait for medical appointments.
“Urgent! Need work for In-house Physicians,” wrote the Office’s assistant veterans service center manager Ameen Khabir in the subject line of a June 19 email to colleagues, which he placed on “High” importance. The Regional Office is responsible for processing compensation, benefits, employment and insurance claims. More than 276,000 veteran benefit claims across the country are still backlogged, having been waiting for more than 125 days. Wait times in Philadelphia reached 309 days in March of this year.
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All those veterans needing healthcare and doctors have nothing to do?
They do bariatric surgery at Philly, I’ll take one of those.
Most VA doctors have 1000 to 1200 patients.
Sounds akin to the Soviet subsistence diet while food rotted in the fields.
...though don’t know if it’s true (the VA part ).
If the paperwork shufflers can’t get it together to make appointments then the actual caregivers will have free time.
Bureaucracy control is mostly held by the paperwork people.
The trouble here in Colorado was that the schedulers could not find an open time to make an appointment for a Doctor.
I’m just commenting based on my experience working with a public employee union in CA. It cost more to pay someone to shuffle paperwork to decide eligibility than for say, the actual food stamps, then it would to just give the stamps to people and tract how much/how often. Same with MediCal. When MediCal had budget problems, the Docs took a hit, not the social eligibility workers. With benefits and everything, they do better than the professionals.
The patient load for a Kaiser doctor I know here in Southern California is more than 10 times that amount.
These aren’t the “regular” VA Doctors. These are the Doctors who examine Veterans for disability.
How can they have such a big back log in disability cases when they have these Doctors doing nothing?
The administrative side of the VA needs some investigation, too. This looks like people covering up for VA thievery.
A report I read about the Phoenix VA said cardiologists at the VA in PHX averaged seeing 3 patients a day, while civilian cardiologists averaged seeing 12 a day. The report did not blame the cardiologists at the VA, instead they pointed to scheduling issues and required training.
I doubt that many are patients are in as bad shape as the veterans.
One slight correction. They don't examine veterans for disability, but review medical records related to disability claims. They also provide medical advice and instruction to non medically trained rating specialist. Most are retired from active medical practice or for some reason can't or don't want to see patients.
Wow! Doctors being paid to do nothing while vets don’t get the care they need. That debunks any claim that they are “underfunded.” Thanks for posting this.
When you exclude weekends and holidays I think that still comes out to about 3-4 patients seen per day. Sounds somewhat low don’t you think?
Wasn’t this where zombies started according to the “based on a true story” urban legend?
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