About one-third of the veterans waiting to receive health care from Veterans Affairs have already died, according to an internal agency report leaked to The Huffington Post.
The report reviewed the accuracy of the VA's veteran death records and found that 238,657 of the 847,822 veterans in the pending backlog for medical care are already deceased, meaning they applied for health care and died before receiving it.
Scott Davis, a program specialist at the VA's Health Eligibility Center in Atlanta, provided HuffPo with the report and also sent copies to the House and Senate VA panels and to the White House, hoping to pressure the VA to provide speedier health care to veterans.
Some of the applicants died years ago, but the VA's 30-year-old electronic health record system has no way of purging dead applicants from its system, VA spokeswoman Walinda West told HuffPo, adding that some of the applications were never completed but remained pending anyway.
More than 80 percent of veterans who come to the department "have either Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare or some other private insurance," West said. "Consequently, some in pending status may have decided to use other options instead of completing their eligibility application."
Davis dismissed West on every point, saying for starters that incomplete applications would not be listed in the system as pending.
"VA wants you to believe, by virtue of people being able to get health care elsewhere, it's not a big deal. But VA is turning away tens of thousands of veterans eligible for health care," Davis told HuffPo. "VA is making it cumbersome, and then saying, 'See? They didn't want it anyway.'"
The release is likely to infuriate lawmakers still fuming from last year's scandal when a number of investigations revealed long delays in care and wait times, including falsified data that may have led to the death of veterans. The FBI even initiated an investigation, and the controversy eventually resulted in the resignation of the VA Secretary Eric Shinseki and drew promises of reform from the VA and President Obama.
But as the Washington Times reported last month, 50 percent more veterans than last year are now on waiting lists of a month or more.
The same day the Huffington Post released its report, the VA's second-in-command, Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson, wrote Congress saying that the VA needs to fill a $3 billion budget shortfall by the end of July or risk shutting down hospital operations during August.
