The Congress Critter experienced the same health care at the VA as his constituents.
Via The Boston Globe
Seth Moulton had earned two medals in Iraq for his valor. He’d witnessed brutal combat in four tours with the Marines. But none of that mattered when he showed up at the Veterans Health Administration hospital in Washington, D.C., where staff could not find records.
“We’ll consider taking you as a humanitarian case,” a hospital staffer told Moulton, unaware that the would-be hernia patient was also a newly elected Massachusetts congressman.
Thus began Moulton’s frustrating experience with the Veterans Affairs health system, a personal sampling of a chronically troubled medical bureaucracy that has drawn complaints from veterans, demands for improvements from Congress, and multiple investigations.
“If it wasn’t so sad, it would have been comical,” Moulton said in an interview as he recounted his VA odyssey.
In addition to enduring missing records and computer glitches, Moulton said, he was prescribed the wrong medicine, which in his case did not imperil his health but is in the category of a medical error that can be extremely dangerous in some cases, even fatal.
The VA refused to discuss Moulton’s case, citing patient privacy laws, even after Moulton gave the administration written and verbal authorization to do so.
Moulton’s encounter with the VA health system led to his first legislative initiative — a package of bills designed to strengthen training and recruitment of VA health care professionals.
A congressional physician tried to steer Moulton away from any Veterans Affairs hospitals when he showed up in the Capitol clinic, days before his Jan. 6 swearing-in ceremony, with a hernia that had resulted from weight lifting. The doctor didn’t know where a VA facility was located and suggested George Washington University Hospital — or anywhere else, Moulton said.
His wasn’t the only warning. Members of Moulton’s platoon told their own horror stories, which they relayed to one another through Facebook chats. Moulton had also followed news reports of fumbled service.
But the Salem Democrat wanted to see how the VA treated patients, so he put himself forth as a sort of guinea pig — arriving at the Washington DC VA Medical Center a few miles north of the Capitol without announcing he was a congressman and without remembering his VA identification card.
HT: TAH