In an absurd attempt by Washington Monthly to claim that the scandal at the Veteran’s Affairs Department was “invented” by the Koch brothers in order to “dismantle the country’s most successful health care system,” the liberal publication made numerous false statements that were contradicted by the agency’s own inspector general report.
Veteran D.C. reporter Alicia Mundy authored the fact-challenged piece and lamented: “Nearly the whole of the Republican Party has become more radically antigovernment in recent years. And since the spring of 2014, when headlines started appearing about long wait times and cover-ups at some VA hospitals, a strong narrative has built up, including in the mainstream media, that the system is fundamentally broken.”
At one point in the article, Mundy seemed to successfully counter one of the major charges against the VA:
Then, on April 9, 2014, at a hearing in the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, Representative Miller dropped the bomb. He announced that his staff had been quietly investigating the VA hospital in Phoenix and had made a shocking discovery: some local VA officials had altered or destroyed records to hide evidence of lengthy wait times for appointments. And worse, Miller claimed, as many as forty veterans could have died while waiting for care.
This latter charge guaranteed screaming headlines from the likes of CNN, but was later shown to be unsubstantiated. An exhaustive independent review of patient records by the VA inspector general uncovered that six, not forty, veterans had died while on waiting lists to see a VA doctor, and in each of these six cases, the IG concluded that “we are unable to conclusively assert that the absence of timely quality care caused the deaths of these veterans.”
The only problem was that the August 26, 2014 VA Inspector General’s report actually concluded: “From our review of PVAHCS [Phoenix VA Health Care System] electronic records, we were able to identify 40 patients who died while on the EWL [electronic wait list] during the period April 2013 through April 2014.”
In fact, a briefing given by the inspector general focused specifically on veterans in the Phoenix area found a total of 293 patient deaths based on a variety of official and unofficial lists. These numbers were not included in the IG’s final report.
Another questionable assertion from the Washington Monthly item: “In most VA facilities, wait times for established patients to see a primary care doc or a specialist were in the range of two to four days....For the VA system as a whole, 96 percent of patients received appointments within thirty days.”
Again, the IG report directly challenged the credibility of those numbers:
Inappropriate scheduling practices are a nationwide systemic problem. We identified multiple types of scheduling practices in use that did not comply with VHA’s scheduling policy. These practices became systemic because VHA did not hold senior headquarters and facility leadership responsible and accountable for implementing action plans that addressed compliance with scheduling procedures.
In May 2013, the then-Deputy Under Secretary for Health for Operations Management waived the FY 2013 annual requirement for facility directors to certify compliance with the VHA scheduling directive, further reducing accountability over wait time data integrity and compliance with appropriate scheduling practices.
Additionally, the breakdown of the ethics system within VHA contributed significantly to the questioning of the reliability of VHA’s reported wait time data. VHA’s audit, directed by the former VA Secretary in May 2014 following numerous allegations, also found that inappropriate scheduling practices were a systemic problem nationwide....
As a result of using inappropriate scheduling practices, reported wait times were unreliable, and we could not obtain reasonable assurance that all veterans seeking care received the care they needed.
The most blatantly false declaration in the article: “In short, there was no fundamental problem at the VA with wait times, in Phoenix or anywhere else.”
The statement could be disproved simply by reading the February 24 USA Today: “After the Veterans Affairs wait-time scandal erupted nearly two years ago, the department's chief watchdog investigated 73 VA facilities across the country and found scheduling problems in 51 cases.”
After the piece ran in Washington Monthly, left-wing magazine Mother Jones eagerly picked it up, adding some its own falsehoods, such as: “However, there was no evidence that this problem was widespread; there was no evidence that it caused any deaths; and there was no evidence that care had been compromised.”
On September 17, 2014, The New York Times reported: “In a contentious hearing before Congress, a senior official from the Department of Veterans Affairs’ watchdog agency acknowledged for the first time on Wednesday that delays in care had contributed to the deaths of patients at the department’s medical center in Phoenix.”
In May of that year, USA Today revealed: “Delays in endoscopy screenings for potential gastrointestinal cancer in 76 veterans treated at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals are linked to 23 deaths, most of them three to four years ago, according to the VA.”
Perhaps rather than spinning conspiracy theories about conservatives somehow manufacturing government scandals, liberal reporters should focus on actually fact-checking their articles.
