Earlier this year, the Trump administration purged 270,000 pending Veteran’s Affair applications that were the subject of multiple ongoing congressional committee & Government Accountability Office investigations.
Dr. Richard Stone, head of the Veteran’s Health Administration, known as VHA, allegedly consented to the purge during a site visit to VA’s national enrollment office in Atlanta, which manages the VHA enrollment system one week after the mass shooting in Thousand Oaks, California, by a 28-year-old Marine Corps veteran.
This betrays promises President Trump made on the campaign trail and since becoming president.
Trump heavily courted the veteran community for political support during his 2016 campaign for the White House. Their support was critical to his election victory over Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But Trump’s policies have done little to change the corrosive culture at VA or to improve access to care for veterans, mental health services, or suicide prevention.
Despite Trump’s repeated complaints about failures at VA during the Obama administration, he has repeatedly recycled and promoted Obama-era bureaucrats affiliated with past healthcare scandals at the Veterans Health Administration to key roles at VA. First, Trump promoted Obama’s VHA chief, Dr. David Shulkin, to VA Secretary when he couldn’t find anyone else to take the job.
He also promoted Stone, who served as principal deputy undersecretary under President Barack Obama, to be in charge of VHA. Stone was in charge when VHA purged those 270,000 applications. Of those purged applications, 11,000 were from Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans, who are not subject to means tests. Yet erroneously, their applications were tossed into a backlog of applicants who had failed to provide evidence of their means (or income).
The timing of the purge — just after a mass shooting by an unstable combat veteran — makes matters worse. Making combat veterans wait or jump through hoops for health benefits they should get automatically is a particularly dangerous form of government incompetence.
A September 2017 Government Accountability Office report found the VA was still not only failing to process half of all new applications within the required five business days, but was leaving some lingering for as long as three months.
“We and others have expressed concerns about VA’s inability to effectively provide and oversee timely access to health care, which, in some cases, reportedly has resulted in harm to veterans,” GAO’s report said.
What makes the decision to purge the healthcare applications so egregious is the Trump administration’s acknowledgment that enrollment in VA healthcare impacts veteran mental health and suicide prevention. On January 9, 2018, President Trump enthusiastically issued an executive order to tackle the veteran mental-health crisis of 20 suicides per day. The plan was to begin the process of auto-enrolling service members into VA healthcare. Shulkin specifically cited the higher risk of veteran suicides for those not enrolled in the first year after leaving the military.
However, VA Secretary Robert Wilkie and Stone have ignored Trump’s auto-enrollment initiative to improve enrollment operations at VA as veteran healthcare applications were dumped.
Trump signed the Honoring Our Commitment Act on March 23, 2018, expanding mental healthcare benefits to veterans to reduce suicides. The law mandated that VA notify eligible veterans about the expanded mental health benefits in 180 days. The law became another broken promise to veterans by Trump, as VA leaders waited almost a year to mail the 500,000 mental healthcare notification letters to eligible veterans.
Both the notification letter mailing campaign and the application purge were facilitated by the Atlanta enrollment office visited by Dr. Stone one week after the Thousand Oaks shooting.
None of the 270,000 veterans whose applications were purged received a notification letter about expanded mental health benefits.
The agency has claimed that it was legally obligated to close the applications to comply with a legal provision found in the Veterans Claims Assistance Act of 2000. However, the 19-year-old law does not state that VA must close all applications after a year. The word “close” is not even mentioned in the law.
VA spokeswoman Susan Carter recently told Snopes.com that the policy for enrollment operations was “still under development” 18 months after Trump issued his executive order to expedite enrollment for veteran healthcare benefits.
Rather than execute the president’s order for auto-enrollment or resolve the concerns raised by GAO, VHA Deputy Undersecretary Renee Oshinski, who is responsible for enrollment operations at VHA, ordered the confiscation of laptops from known whistleblowers and IT staff members in an effort to intimidate employees from speaking to the press about the purge and gross mismanagement of the enrollment system by her office.
Over the past fifteen years, Oshinski has served as Deputy Director and Director for the VISN 12 hospital network, which has been the subject of intense media scrutiny during her tenure for having cockroaches in veteran mental health patients food, over-prescribing medications to veterans resulting in death, bed bugs, and other patient care issues.
On Sept. 7, a Vietnam veteran at the Atlanta VA hospital was twice found covered in ants before he died.
So one might say Wilkie is also ignoring the president’s other executive order about “hiring the best people.”
Several U.S. senators sent a letter to Wilkie on May 22, 2019, informing him that veterans were being told they are ineligible for mental healthcare by VA hospital staff. The letter expressed concerns that the VHA enrollment system automatically categorizes eligible veterans for mental healthcare as ineligible. It also asserted a need for VA to conduct an outreach campaign to educate veterans about mental health benefits, because the agency’s paltry letter campaign constituted doing “the bare minimum.”
Although VA has a $5 million media consulting contract for monitoring VA media coverage, the agency has not spent a dime on outreach to veterans about the new law.
Unfortunately, for now, it is the de facto policy of the U.S. government to delay access to mental healthcare benefits for veterans. The enrollment process, apparently dysfunctional by design, will remain so, impeding the prevention of veteran suicide until Congress intervenes.
Scott Davis (@ScottDavis_WB) is a VA whistleblower who testified before Congress in 2014 about the denial of healthcare benefits to veterans.
