The battle at home: Struggling for VA health care access

Veterans are encountering administrative barriers, waiting lists and staffing shortages when they try to use the VA's health system.

By David Glendinning, AMNews staff. Dec. 3, 2007.

For some veterans, the fight didn't stop on the streets of Iraq or in the mountains of Afghanistan. Despite the promise that world-class medical care would be there for them when they arrived home, some are running into a bureaucratic battlefield and a stressed system struggling to give aid.

Recent congressional and public attention has focused on access problems at the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, which provides medical care to servicemen and women once they have left active duty in a time of war or an official period of hostility. Although investigators note that improvements are under way, they say the VA has a long way to go.

Nearly 700,000 active-duty personnel and reservists who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Afghanistan's Operation Enduring Freedom have been eligible for VA health care since 2002. More than 200,000 have sought it out so far, the Congressional Budget Office reported in October. While this represents only a small fraction of the nearly 8 million veterans from all conflicts who are enrolled, the impact of veterans from today's wars on the system is great.

Thanks to recent advances in battlefield medicine, more servicemen and women are surviving severe injuries, CBO said. But they require more costly medical care when they return. The rapid influx of new enrollees has helped strain a system that already was under pressure from caring for the veterans of yesterday's wars. In 1995, fewer than 3 million veterans received VA health services. That number had increased to 5 million last year.