The United States' Veterans Affairs health system has a weak point and it is the southern portion of the country.
According to a report from The Associated Press, clinics and hospitals in that region are far behind others when it comes to providing timely care.
In 2014 Congress spent $16.3 billion to try to decrease the wait time at VA hospitals. However, times still aren't down — they have mostly stayed the same.
From Aug. 1, 2014, to Feb. 28, 2015, approximately 894,000 appointments at VA medical centers did not meet the mandated 30 day timeliness goal, according to the AP. Twenty-five percent of those appointments took at least double the mandated time. On top of that, the amount of veterans that had to wait 90 days to get proper healthcare has almost doubled.
"I think what we are seeing is that as we improve access, more veterans are coming," Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs Sloan Gibson said. "...We are doing a whole series of things - the right things, I believe - to deal with the immediate issue. But we need an intermediate term plan that moves us ahead a quantum leap, so that we don't continue over the next three or four years just trying to stay up. We've got to get ahead of demand."
Many of the hospitals that are the biggest culprits of long wait times are housed in Southern States, which, as the AP points out, have "a strong military presence, a rural population and patient growth that has outpaced the VA's sluggish planning process."
Out of the 75 centers that have the most trouble meeting the 30-day mandate, "12 are in Tennessee or Kentucky, 11 are in eastern North Carolina and the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, [and] 11 are in Georgia or southern Alabama and six are in north Florida," the AP reported. Seven other of the hospitals and clinics are in Albuquerque, N.M., and Colorado Springs, Colo.
There are more than 1,000 VA centers nationwide, so in relation those hospitals are a small number overall, but they largely impacted the statistics. More than one in five of appointments that took longer than 60 days to complete were in those southern mentioned hospitals, the AP reported.
VA Centers in other regions, particularly the Northeast, Midwest and Pacific Northwest, are doing significantly better with timely healthcare.
At one VA's outpatient clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., more than 7,100 appointments completed between Sept. 1 and Feb. 28 included at least 60 day waits. That's more delays at that single center than all in Pennsylvania and New York combined.
