

Last year’s parade of scandals and failures at the Department of Veterans Affairs do not appear to have resulted in much reform. According to a New York Times report, the number of vets on a waiting list for a month or longer is currently 50 percent higher than it was last year. They also have a roughly $3 billion budget shortfall.



The VA does boast a few improvement—their doctors and nurses saw 2.7 million more appointments than any other year, and they increased their capacity by over 7 million patients a year.



But, department officials told the Times, they failed to anticipate that demand would increase by as much as one-fifth at some hospitals in just the last year.



Physicians’ workloads grew accordingly—by 20 percent at some hospitals in states like Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.



North Carolina, Virginia, Souther California, and parts of Nevada saw similar booms.



Deputy secretary Sloan D. Gibson will testify before Congress on Thursday, and ask for permission to move funds around. Republicans are unlikely to be happy with his suggestions. He wants to take money from the “Choice Card,” a program which lets vets seek outside care from private doctors, and use it to pay for hepatitis C treatment and other needs.



Read the full report here.