DoD spent nearly $363 million on weight-loss surgeries in past decade
Filed under: Health data, Health journalism, Hot Health Headline, Public records
Reporting for KIRO-Seattle, Chris Halsne used FOIA requests to find out how much the military’s TriCare plan is paying for weight-loss surgeries for soldiers and their dependents. Including post-surgery tummy tucks, Halsne calculates (PDF) that the government was on the hook for at least $362,971,831 for such procedures over the past decade.
The military defends the expenditures by pointing to the long-term savings of having healthier TriCare enrollees, though Halsne found those savings difficult to prove, as 86 percent of soldiers and their families leave the plan before they qualify for lifetime benefits.
Halsne found that even some active-duty personnel are getting bariatric procedures, which are officially off limits to them as they are required to stay fit through diet and exercise to remain in the military.
While analyzing Defense Department records on health-related costs, KIRO Team 7 Investigators also discovered the military continues to pay for some weight loss surgery for active duty personnel. Records show $2,400,000 worth since 2001. The military banned bariatric procedures for active duty soldiers and sailors in 2007, yet it appears they approved around 57 of them after that.
Tricare, the military’s health insurance program funded by federal taxpayers, declined KIRO’s repeated questions for an interview.
VA centers in 30 states, D.C. used recalled wipes
JoNel Aleccia of MSNBC.com continues her reporting on tainted and recalled alcohol prep pads, finding that “A quarter of the nation’s Veterans Health Administration medical centers and the agency’s outpatient mail-order pharmacy used recalled alcohol prep pads and other products …”
The FDA has identified problems with contamination and sterilization at the plant where the products were manufactured and hundreds of millions of products were recalled because of the threat of bacterial contamination.
The VA says “38 of the country’s 152 major veterans medical centers in 30 states and the District of Columbia removed recalled wipes, pads and other products from use” and “products were removed from the Consolidated Mail Outpatient Pharmacy, which provides more than 97.4 million prescriptions a year to veterans.”
Previously, the FDA the company that manufactured the wipes refused to identify which hospitals used the products, but Aleccia has obtained and published a list of the affected VA facilities.
Recalled povidone iodine prep pads from the same company also have been included in first aid kits intended for animals, such as this equine first-aid kit.
Previous coverage:
- Parents blame toddler’s death on tainted wipes
- FDA knew of problems at plant that made tainted wipes
- FDA defends actions on tainted wipes
- Colo. hospital blew whistle on tainted wipes
- Pressured firm closes line that made tainted wipes
- Infection risk triggers new recall of wipes
- Two-thirds of alcohol wipes contaminated
- FDA asks maker of tainted wipes to stop production
- Senators question FDA’s response to tainted wipes
- Wipe-maker shuts doors after U.S. Marshals arrive
- Feds seize $6 million in products from wipe-maker
Spreadsheet lists malpractice claims against VA
In its “FOIA Friday” feature, the Project On Government Oversight reveals a spreadsheet (XLS format) of claims against the Department of Veterans Affairs, including thousands related to medical malpractice.
The spreadsheet lists administrative claims, the first step in the VA’s process for filing claims.
Nick Schwellenbach explains more about the data:
The data provided has details on over 12,000 claims against the VA from 1989 to November 2008, although the data appears largely incomplete for the first several years. Not all of the claims are medical malpractice-related, but several thousand are. There are fields for the VA facility involved, the date the claim was received, the date of the last tort status (where the claim is in the administrative process), the date of that status, alleged negligence descriptions (none exist for non-medical malpractice tort cases), and amount paid out, if any. The spreadsheet is over two years old, so the latest tort status field may be out-of-date for many of these claims.
The spreadsheet includes 16 cases in which more than $1 million was paid out. The descriptions of the allegations are pretty vague but those 16 cases include:
- Failure To Obtain Consent or /Lack Of Informed Consent; Improper Technique; Improper Performance; Improper Management; Delay In Diagnosis; Failure To Treat; Failure To Order Appropriate Medication; Failure To Monitor; Failure To Diagnose (i.e., Concluding That Patient Has No Disease or Condit[ion)]
- Failure To Respond To Patient
- Surgical or Other Foreign Body Retained
- Unnecessary Procedure; Intubation Problem; Improperly Performed Test; Improper Management
It’s worth noting that another recent “FOIA Friday” also was related to health. It was a letter sent by the National Institutes of Health to Emory University “after the media exposed Dr. Zachary Stowe’s cozy financial relationship with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) while also receiving NIH grants to study antidepressants like GSK’s Paxil in pregnant women.”
Story on soldiers’ aches and pains wins member a Mid-America Emmy
Filed under: Government, Health journalism, Member news
A story inspired by a session at Health Journalism 2009 earned member Meryl Lin McKean the 2010 Emmy for Health/Science News at the Mid-America Emmy Awards this year. McKean is the medical reporter at WDAF-Kansas City. Her story looked beyond casualty rates to the everyday aches and pains that come as a result of active military service in Iraq and Afghanistan. The video is no longer available, but the accompanying text demonstrates the scope and severity of such problems.
Soldiers return to a border checkpoint in the Khowst province of Afghanistan. Photo by The U.S. Army via Flickr
A V.A. report found that nearly half of the returning vets from Iraq and Afghanistan have bone, joint or tissue injuries. At Kansas City’s V.A. Medical Center, 17% of the vets seen in the new post-deployment clinic have those injuries. That’s still far higher than in non-vets.
“This age group between 18 and 30 — you might expect five percent at the most,” says Bob Fletcher, V. A. Physician’s Assistant.
Fletcher says the problems are clearly related to the combat load. And the problems for many vets will continue. Those problems include include arthritis pain and stiffness, the inability to hold certain jobs that require much movement, and possible dependence on pain medication.
VA pays for Agent Orange-related illnesses despite lack of evidence
Hundreds of thousands of Vietnam veterans are being compensated by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for illnesses the agency says are related to Agent Orange, as Associated Press reporter Mike Baker found. On the face of it, that might not be particularly surprising. Agent Orange has been convincingly linked to cancer and a number of other ailments. But, and here’s the interesting bit, the illnesses most Agent Orange-exposed veterans are being compensated for – things like diabetes and erectile dysfunction – have never been authoritatively linked to the defoliant.
Because of worries about Agent Orange, about 270,000 Vietnam veterans — more than one-quarter of the 1 million receiving disability checks — are getting compensation for diabetes, according to Department of Veterans Affairs records obtained by The Associated Press through the Freedom of Information Act.
More Vietnam veterans are being compensated for diabetes than for any other malady, including post-traumatic stress disorder, hearing loss or general wounds.
Tens of thousands of other claims for common ailments of age — erectile dysfunction among them — are getting paid as well because of a possible link, direct or indirect, to Agent Orange.
Not only that, but the list is growing. The VA has announced it will add chronic B cell leukemias, Parkinson’s and ischemic heart disease to the list of conditions that it will “presume to be related to Agent Orange and other herbicide exposures.” This means even more common, aging-related illnesses will be covered by the VA, an expensive proposition.
The agency estimates that the new rules, which will go into effect in two months unless Congress intervenes, will cost $42 billion over the next 10 years.
Related
PTSD or personality disorder? It matters to soldiers
Filed under: Government, Health journalism, Health policy, Studies
The AP’s Anne Flaherty has put together a story that illuminates the Army’s refusal to admit that it could have misdiagnosed (and discharged) hundreds of soldiers who may have had PTSD or traumatic brain injury instead of a personality disorder. Keep in mind that a discharge for “personality disorder” means no veterans’ benefits and a lifetime of stigma. A diagnosis of PTSD or injury, on the other hand, means treatment will be covered by the government.
Photo by isafmedia via FlickrThe Army, for its part, has decided there’s nothing unusual about the following chain of events (taken from Flaherty’s story):
- The Army “discharged about a 1,000 soldiers a year between 2005 and 2007 for having a personality disorder.”
- In 2007, The Nation’s Joshua Kors writes a cover story exposing the Army’s apparent habit of diagnosing soldiers with a personality disorder instead of considering the possibility of PTSD or traumatic brain injury.
- Soon after, “the Defense Department changed its policy and began requiring a top-level review of each case to ensure post-traumatic stress or a brain injury wasn’t the underlying cause.”
- Sure enough, “the annual number of personality disorder cases dropped by 75 percent.”
- At the same time, the number of post-traumatic stress disorder cases has soared. By 2008, more than 14,000 soldiers had been diagnosed with PTSD — twice as many as two years before.
- Army officials “reviewed the paperwork of all deployed soldiers dismissed with a personality disorder between 2001 and 2006″ and said they “did not find evidence that soldiers with PTSD had been inappropriately discharged with personality disorder.”
Report links Gulf War, illness; calls for more study
The Institute of Medicine has released a report, sponsored by the Department of Veterans Affairs, on certain health issues in Gulf War veterans.
The committee behind the report wrote that insufficient data from immediately before and after deployment made drawing clear conclusions difficult, but called for a commitment to monitoring and caring for what the release called “persistent, unexplained symptoms” in Gulf War veterans. It also said that interaction between genes and the environment was likely a factor in veterans’ “multisymptom illness.”
The key paragraph from the press release (emphasis mine):
Military service in the Persian Gulf War is a cause of post-traumatic stress disorder in some veterans and is also associated with multisymptom illness; gastrointestinal disorders such as irritable bowel syndrome; substance abuse, particularly alcoholism; and psychiatric problems such as anxiety disorder, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine, the latest update in a series of reports on the Gulf War and veterans’ health. There is some evidence that service during the conflict is linked to fibromyalgia and chronic widespread pain, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, sexual difficulties, and death due to causes such as car accidents in the early years after deployment, but the data are limited, said the committee that wrote the report.
VA works toward improving care for female vets
Acknowledging that female veterans have gotten short shrift at VA hospitals, some are now working to improve the services and experience women receive, according to NPR’s Erin Toner.
For example, the Clement J. Zablocki VA Medical Center in Milwaukee now has a women’s clinic and one manager there says the hospital is working to change the culture.
Toner also reports that a bill pending in Congress would “authorize a study of women who’ve served in Iraq and Afghanistan to find out how the wars have affected their physical, mental and reproductive health.
“The bill also would require a review of the barriers women face in accessing VA health care.”
NPR also includes a map of how many female veterans are in each state.
Related
During a 2008 panel on veterans’ health presented by the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of AHCJ, Tia Christopher described her difficulties getting the help she needed as a Navy veteran who survived military sexual trauma and has PTSD. She expressed concern for female vets, whose experiences and health issues are significantly different from those of male soldiers and are largely underreported.
Listen to Christopher and the other panelists talk about the health care challenges facing vetereans.
KQED profiles those who live with disease, injury
This month’s edition of Health Dialogues, part of KQED’s California Report, focuses on living with disease. In the report, KQED reporters talk to folks living with chronic disease, the effects of traumatic injury and other conditions that can have lasting effects on a person’s quality of life.
To provide insight into the life and routine of someone coping with chronic disease, reporters profile a music programmer ‘coping’ with diabetes, an activist who stumbled upon a forgotten childhood diagnosis of hepatitis B and a cellist with multiple sclerosis. They also talk to a couple dealing with cancer and two sisters on opposite ends of an organ donation chain.
In addition to cancer and disease, KQED reporters also explore how the lasting effects of traumatic injury can shape your life. Pieces include a KPBS reporter talking about his own traumatic brain injury and the story of a surfing-based physical therapy program for veterans.
War injuries advance treatment of brain injuries
In a three-part package published this month, the Los Angeles Times‘ Melissa Healy explains recent advances in the diagnosis and treatment of traumatic brain injury, with special focus on the United States armed forces.
- Treating traumatic brain injuries: Anecdotes from an Army National Guard medic and an equipment officer show how much lives can be changed by traumatic brain injury, an ailment that doesn’t even show up on CT scans or MRIs, and how a simple accurate diagnosis can provide patients with hope and understanding.
- War injury leads to advances at home: Healy writes that while combat veterans with traumatic brain injury are receiving the lion’s share of the attention, they’re just the tip of the iceberg. The “silent epidemic” has hit about 2 percent of the civilian population as well, which totals up to about 11 million since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began.
- Treating brain injuries on the sports field and battlefield: Finally, after tackling diagnosis and prevalence, Healy moves on to treatment. She walks through every step, from prevention to diagnosis to treatment, examining the latest in medical science along the way. It’s the longest piece in the package, and the best to start with if you’re looking for a better technical understanding of traumatic brain injury.
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New at HealthJournalism.org
- Data gives depth to investigation of patient safety
- What reporters should know about Alzheimer’s and related dementias
- Apply for fellowships to attend Health Journalism 2012
- AHCJ asks Supreme Court to permit broadcast of arguments in health reform case
- Tips for print, online journalists to embrace broadcast opportunities
- Numbers reveal how often, or how rarely, states check doctors’ disciplinary records
- How I did it: Falsified charts in nursing homes linked to patient care
- Access Denied: Looking at a lack of health care availability
- Transparency & medical errors: Public reporting of patient harm is a potent force
