September 2, 2015: CNN reports that as many as 300,000 vets have died waiting for treatment at VA hospitals based on a report by the Virginia Inspector General:
(CNN)Hundreds of thousands of veterans listed in the Department of Veterans Affairs enrollment system died before their applications for care were processed, according to a report issued Wednesday.
The VA’s inspector general found that out of about 800,000 records stalled in the agency’s system for managing health care enrollment, there were more than 307,000 records that belonged to veterans who had died months or years in the past. The inspector general said due to limitations in the system’s data, the number of records did not necessarily represent veterans actively seeking enrollment in VA health care.
In a response to a request by the House Committee on Veterans Affairs’ to investigate a whistleblower’s allegations of mismanagement at the VA’s Health Eligibility Center, the inspector general also found VA staffers incorrectly marked unprocessed applications and may have deleted 10,000 or more records in the last five years.
In one case, a veteran who applied for VA care in 1998 was placed in “pending” status for 14 years. Another veteran who passed away in 1988 was found to have an unprocessed record lingering in 2014, the investigation found.
For more than a year, CNN investigated and reported on veterans’ deaths and delays at VA facilities across the country, including detailed investigations in November 2013 and January 2014 examining deaths at two VA facilities in South Carolina and Georgia.
So CNN reported it initially. Using the reports, Carly Fiorina repeats the story.
Cue FactCheck.org:
Carly Fiorina on several occasions has said 307,000 veterans have died while waiting for care from the Veterans Health Administration. In one instance, she said all of those veterans “died in the last year,” citing a recent inspector general’s report. But that’s not what the report says.
The VA Office of the Inspector General report said 307,173 of nearly 867,000 pending VA applications belonged to individuals who died. But poor record-keeping made it impossible to say how many of them died while waiting for care or how many of them even applied for care.
The report also said 84 percent of those who died, or 258,367 individuals, died more than four years ago — not last year.Fiorina, a Republican candidate for president, has made the VA report a staple of her recent speeches. At the National Federation of Republican Women Convention in Phoenix, Arizona, on Sept. 11, Fiorina said that “just last month, we got a report that 307,000 veterans have died waiting for an appointment.”
Similarly, she told an audience at the Stretch Kennedy annual picnic in New Hampshire on Sept. 12 that “307,000 veterans had died in the last year waiting for health care.”Fiorina repeated the claim twice during CNN’s prime-time GOP debate on Sept. 16. After the debate, a viewer, and a self-proclaimed veteran, asked us to check Fiorina’s claim.
On Sept. 2, the VA Office of the Inspector General released a report titled “Veterans Health Administration: Review of Alleged Mismanagement at the Health Eligibility Center.” The report addressed four questions about the eligibility center, including an allegation first reported by the Atlanta Journal Constitution last year that more than 47,000 veterans died while their applications were still pending.
Bottom line?
Fiorina’s Unsupported Claim about VA Deaths
Donald Trump made campaign statements using the same information. Cue Politifact:
Donald Trump came to the U.S. Navy stronghold of Norfolk on Halloween afternoon to announce his plan to fix the “disaster” at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“The current state of the Department of Veterans Affairs is absolutely unacceptable,” Trump said at a rally in front of the retired battleship USS Wisconsin. “Over 300,000 – and this is hard to believe, and it’s actually much more than that now – over 300,000 veterans died waiting for care.”
We decided to check Trump’s claim, which also has been made by Carly Fiorina, one of his rivals for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
Bottom line?
Now, did either FactCheck.org or Politifact take issue directly with CNN, the source of the information?
Nooooooooo, they waited and then seized upon Fiorina and Trump instead when they repeated the information they read and bashed the GOP candidates instead of the originators of the story.
Let’s rate them.
FactCheck.org?
Politifact?
The results are conclusive
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.
I agree therefore its scientific fact by consensus. They are assh@!e$.
If the left didn’t have lies, what would they have to say?
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/veterans-affairs-backlog-files-were-stacked-so-high-they-posed-a-safety-risk-to-va-staff-1/
You gotta see those photos!
From the IG’s report: “We noticed floors bowing under the excess weight to the extent that the tops of file cabinets were noticeably unlevel throughout the storage area.”
Veterans Affairs Administration Inspector General’s report that points out that at one VA center, a regional office in Winston-Salem, N.C., had so much paper that it “created an unsafe workspace for (VA) employees and appeared to have the potential to compromise the integrity of the building.”
But Carly and Donald are selling a lie, right, ”PolIFACT.”
Dr J
Why did you never quit your well paying job and go to work at the VA?
Conservatives are always complaining about the work that teachers, the VA the IRS does but they never seem to want to work at those places and serve others.
Dr J how many times have YOU volunteered to go the West Roxbury VA? http://usuncut.com/politics/happy-veterans-day-5-times-republicans-in-congress-screwed-veterans/
The GOP has had many opportunities to give me funding to the VA they always say NO
Funny how the libs think the answer is always more money, a well funded but very poorly run place just needs more money to make it all better.
http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/255643-senate-democrats-bloc
Guess there are a$$holes on every side.
@john:
Here’s a better idea; why don’t liberals like yourself stop supporting lying Democrats that throw other people’s money at problems instead of holding government employees accountable? It’s people like you that keep rewarding failure, preferring to have an issue to blame on the political opposition (though one of your own Presidential candidate has had oversight over the VA).
If the VA simply needs more funding, why are they burning off cash every year to spend their budget so they can keep getting increases?
@john:
Why would anyone give you funding to the VA?
@DrJohn: Because all that matters is that some money (someone else’s) gets thrown at the problem. What happens after that doesn’t matter to liberals.
Trump wants to make it easier for Veterans to visit ‘regular’ doctors instead of dealing with this bull crap…Private vs Government Run and directed? Private doctors wins hands down…
..just have to create safe guards against fraud…fraud from people pretending they are veterans…puke!
Never believe an organization who name themselves FactCheck” or some such nonsense. Like they are going to set it straight. They are just a bunch of SJW Democrat operatives running flak for the Obama Administration. Even the once venerable Snopes have let their Democrat political leanings influence their “fact checking” and are no longer as reliable as they once were. Of course, they could just be afraid of consequences if they spoke factually about certain subjects. In that case best to avoid those subjects entirely than provide disinformation as fact. At least they’d still have their reputation.
I only have one comment about Dr. John’s blog on the statement he made:
“DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.”
How profound John! As if anyone with an ounce of common sense didn’t know this already. I am an example of working hard for years, and when nothing became of it the self fulfilling part of “but nothing in life is guaranteed”, was realized.
Instead of writing and publishing your opinion’s you should help young people starting out in life, after age 18, choose a clear path to do something that is mostly guaranteed to “do well” as you put it.
How to make a progressive angry? Lie to them. How to make a conservative angry? Tell them the truth.
@donnie drumpf: So liberals are perpetually angry because Obama and Hillary have lied to them so consistently?
@Donald S: Young people do not listen. They already think they know it all.
Preemptively discrediting all sources of contrary information is a common propaganda technique used by totalitarian leaders and fanatical cult leaders. It’s one of the ways mobs are controlled and manipulated.
Politifact and Factcheck.org generally provide multiple sources that support their statements and conclusions. Unlike the right wing media, the sources aren’t limited to other outlets that simply echo what they hear the others saying.
Dr John, you are not making the point you think you are making. This article of yours shows only that CNN reported information that is incorrect, not that Politifact or Factcheck.org are liars. Both sites had the facts as reported from the VHA, you are taking offense to the fact that they didn’t fact check CNN. That is not the same as lying, that is an omission of a fact check of one source, CNN. Biased in selection on what gets fact checked, but not lying on the part of these two websites.
THEY did not that the veterans thing is not true it says that it wasn’t confirmed what they were checking was Donald Trump statements which state determined was partly false or mostly false whatever the rating was which is in fact accurate. Furthermore why would they use CNN to factcheck CNN? They can clearly see what they reported. Maybe the other party could not be reached or they had no information to reach them. It doesn’t say so one can only speculate that. Factcheck.org is the most unbiased checker there is.
Why would they check with CNN anyway? They clearly see what they reported lol
I don’t see that this group is any better.
@Select: That is the real point. CNN got it wrong and Fiorina and Trump repeated it. I do believe that they also knew that those “facts” sounded improbable and did have a staff member check them. Those people are not stupid. What is important is that they think we are and it worked. Was the VA record keeping sloppy, probably yes. Did 300,000 vets die in the past year or two waiting to be helped? No. Did Fiorina and Trump know that? Probably or most likely yes. When intelligent people repeat bazaar, unchecked claims that sound strange to them, without checking them, they are lying.
Carly Fiorina – ” In one instance, she said all of those veterans “died in the last year,” ”
CNN never said that.
Trump – ” over 300,000 veterans died waiting for care.””
FRom the CNN article:
“there were more than 307,000 records that belonged to veterans who had died months or years in the past. The inspector general said due to limitations in the system’s data, the number of records did not necessarily represent veterans actively seeking enrollment in VA health care.”
So why are you blaming CNN? So you can deflect away from Trump.
Beside, don’t you want people in politics to actually not get their information from media headlines?
The only problem with CNN is that they write at a 6th grade level. You need to, at the very least, understand and apply the SPJ code of ethics to any media outlet to even begin to see if they are honest.
I wonder if the irony that the only reason Trump won was because of the amount of free press CNN gave him is lost on you?
Did anyone of you complainers read the actual CNN report before screaming your own bias? Fiorina and Trump took liberties with the language in the CNN report, making false claims that were not in the report, but CNN and FactCheck are the bad guys? Words have meaning, but somehow the words of these two are exempt from criticism., and this is the concrete proof of a bias by people who actually understand, and hold politicians to, the meaning of words? Lacking such an understanding, you shouldn’t be weighing in on the spoken language.
One of the most accurate comments in this thread is #16 from Select. Dr. John’s headline said he had “Concrete proof” that these sites were “liars”. I know that I risk being insulted and labeled a liberal snowflake for asking this (ironically, I am neither conservative nor liberal) but can someone please point out to me where he proved that Politifact and Factcheck literally lied? I thought it would be much easier to see because it was so concrete but I haven’t found it yet. One last thing – is it just me or does anyone else have a slight concern about trusting the credibility of a site called “flopping aces”?
@Ed: people need to list their political position I am a centrist, that give an idea your beliefs lye.
Who Are The Ten Most Honest and Lying American Politicians?
Just the facts, Ma’am.
June 6, 2018 — Scaramucci On Trump Lies: ‘There’s Different Styles Of Communication’
It isn’t telling lie after lie, day in and day out, that makes one a liar, it seems. On Planet Trump, the determining factor is how many people believe the lies.
Repetition is the pathway to Truth.
@Greg:
Says the guy that BELIEVES Hillary when she said she deleted 33,000 emails immediately after they were requested for evidence because they were all about yoga, weddings and funerals.
Your fact check doesn’t line up. This is fodder for the fact-lovers to pontificate about ‘fake news’. The CNN article didn’t say what Fiorina and Trump said. It clearly says in the article, which wasn’t mentioned as Fiorina’s source (her source was CNN’s source — the original) “that 307,000 records that belonged to veterans who had died months or *years in the past*.” I’m not sure how this translates into the past year.
Anyway, I do take these fact checkers with a grain of salt — mainly because in their “facts” are paradigmatic. And they’re lefties. So, I don’t think there’s any need to grasp for straws.