Audit: More bad accounting in veterans health care

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Audit: More bad accounting in veterans health care

By HOPE YEN
Associated Press Writer


WASHINGTON (AP) -- Two years after a politically embarrassing $1 billion shortfall that imperiled veterans health care, the Veterans Affairs Department is still lowballing budget estimates to Congress to keep its spending down, government investigators say.

The report by the Government Accountability Office, set to be released Friday, highlights the Bush administration's problems in planning for the treatment of veterans that President Barack Obama has pledged to fix. It found the VA's long-term budget plan for the rehabilitation of veterans in nursing homes, hospices and community centers to be flawed, failing to account for tens of thousands of patients and understating costs by millions of dollars.

In its strategic plan covering 2007 to 2013, the VA inflated the number of veterans it would treat at hospices and community centers based on a questionably low budget, the investigators concluded. At the same time, they said, the VA didn't account for roughly 25,000 - or nearly three-quarters - of its patients who receive treatment at nursing homes operated by the VA and state governments each year.

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According to latest GAO report, the VA is believed to have:

-Undercut its 2009 budget estimate for nursing home care by roughly $112 million. It noted the VA planned for $4 billion in spending, up $108 million from the previous year, based largely on a projected 2.5 percent increase in costs. But previously, the VA had actually seen an annual cost increase of 5.5 percent.

-Underestimated costs of care in noninstitutional settings such as hospices by up to $144 million. The VA assumed costs would not increase in 2009, even though in recent years the cost of providing a day of noninstitutional care increased by 19 percent.

-Overstated the amount of noninstitutional care. The VA projected a 38 percent increase in patient workload in 2009, partly in response to previous GAO and inspector general reports that found widespread gaps in services and urged greater use of the facilities. But for unknown reasons, veterans served in recent years actually decreased slightly, and the VA offered no explanation as to how it planned to get higher enrollment.