Free Republic

When former Coast Guardsman Amanda Wolfe went to the emergency room because her appendix was about to burst in September 2016, she figured her insurance would cover the cost. She had two kinds of insurance — a private plan she paid for and her Veterans Affairs benefits. The emergency appendectomy went well and Wolfe made a speedy recovery. Her private insurance covered most of the more than $20,000 bill for her hospital stay. But six months later, the VA denied her claim for the roughly $2,500 that remained, putting her in an unexpected financial bind. She has been appealing ever...

The VA has proposed removing the net worth reporting requirement for veterans seeking VA healthcare. In a proposal scheduled to be filed in the Federal Register on October 20, the VA seeks to make permanent its temporary practice of not requiring a veteran to submit a net-worth statement when they apply for healthcare. The VA will also no longer require annual net-worth statements from veterans who are currently enrolled in its healthcare programs. ... The VA now seeks to remove any wording in the law related to its collection of net-worth data to prevent any confusion and make it permanently...

An internal Veterans Affairs Department report states that about one-third of the veterans waiting to receive medical care from the agency have already died. ... as of April, 847,822 veterans were awaiting healthcare and that of those, 238,647 were already deceased. The report was handed over by Scott Davis, a program specialist at the VA's Health Eligibility Center in Atlanta He also sent copies to the House and Senate VA panels and to the White House. ... VA wants you to believe, by virtue of people being able to get health care elsewhere, it's not a big deal. But VA...

A former supervisor in the Dayton VA Medical Center’s dental clinic blamed intervention by the NAACP for foiling his efforts in the early 1990s to remove a dentist whose lax infection control practices put patients’ safety at risk. Dr. Dwight M. Pemberton continued to practice dentistry at the Dayton VA, often failing to change latex gloves and sterilize dental instruments between patients...Between 1992 and July 2010, 535 patients who had invasive dental work by Pemberton may have been exposed to bloodborne pathogens, the VA said. Nine have preliminary positive results for hepatitis B or hepatitis C. In the early 1990s,...