Nearly 30,000 combat veterans still can't get health care due to a glitch in the Department of Veterans Affairs computer system seven months after top officials first learned of the problem, according to The Huffington Post.
HuffPo first published internal VA documents in August showing that more than 35,000 former troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan had their health care applications mistakenly placed on a "pending" list after they failed to complete a test about household income, even though the information is not required from combat vets.
But since the VA system is not set up to automatically exempt combat vets from the income test, thousands of applications were backlogged.
Management at the VA has known about the computer error since at least April, but there are indications that some at the agency have known since 2012, according to HuffPo.
The VA said it conducted an initial review in August and was able to enroll 8,578 of the backlogged vets, however, as of now, 29,000 are still without health insurance due to the glitch, and the number hasn't changed since September.
Combat vets lose their eligibility for free health care after five years, and nearly half of the 29,000 have already been on the pending list for more than five years, according to HuffPo.
War veterans affected by the glitch resided in all 50 states, Vocative found in August. Twenty-one states had 500 or more vets who had been denied health care due to the error, and eight states had more than 1,000. Texas had the most, with 3,275 affected vets, followed by California with 3,199 and Florida with 1,828. Vocativ said it has been unable to update its state-by-state breakdown because the VA has not released current data.
VA spokeswoman Walinda West insisted that the agency is working as fast as possible to resolve the issue. "VA is continuing to research Combat Veterans with expired eligibility in order to ensure appropriate remedies," West said.
However, Scott Davis, a program specialist at the VA's Health Eligibility Center in Atlanta who has previously blown the whistle on VA mismanagement, said VA officials are intentionally delaying action because enrolling all the combat vets at once would "force them to admit they made a huge mistake," according to HuffPo.
Admitting to such a huge mistake could also force the agency to compensate thousands of vets and their families for health care costs that would have been covered if the vets were immediately enrolled when they applied rather than put on a pending list until the five-year free coverage period expired.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton promised Tuesday to modernize the VA's troubled computer system to prevent future repeats.
"More than 35,000 combat veterans have been waiting as long as seven months to get health care because of a computer glitch," Clinton said at a town hall, calling for a massive technology upgrade so the VA can better share information within its agency as well as with the Defense Department and private hospitals, reports The Washington Times. "We need to lead the VA system to the 21st century when it comes to technology."
