VA Mistakenly Tells Vets They Have Fatal Illness 108
An anonymous reader writes "Thanks to a computer glitch and bad diagnosis coding, the VA sent a letter to thousands of veterans telling them they have Lou Gehrig's Disease. Some were right, but many were mistakes. From the article, 'Recently, the VA determined ALS to be a service-connected disability and generated automatic letters to all veterans whose records included the code for the disease. However, since the coding contained both ALS and undiagnosed neurological disorders, some of those letters were erroneous.'"
Re:The VA would like to apologize for any.. (Score:5, Interesting)
health insurance policies refused
If you're getting a letter from the VA you already have free liftetime health insurance, and in the US it's illegal to decline someone a job on account of their medical condition, insofar as it doesn't interfere with performance, which for someone who doesn't have a disease, it won't.
I'm sure there's some sort of latent point in this about "socialized medicine" or something, but for every one of these letters with the wrong diagnosis, I assure you a private insurer has cancelled the policy on dozens of people for no goddamn reason [time.com]. And those people sometimes commit suicide too.
There are many scary anecdotes about the VA, but they're just that, anecdotes. Customer satisfaction within the VA health system regularly outscores [va.gov] customer satisfaction in the private health insurance/care system.
PS. If you get a letter saying you have an incurable disease, damn the letter. You must hear it from your doctor's own lips, and then only after you have had the outcome of the tests throughly explained to you.
Re:it happens, (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't understand. How is offering vets free healthcare IN ADDITION to the healthcare options available to every other American citizen anything at all like "shooting veterans dead on the white house lawn?"
Having another option, even if its not ideal, seems like a good thing to me.
Re:I smell a rat (Score:3, Interesting)
2 If someones file has the code they should already be diagnosed right.
We're still stuck using ICD9 coding. We were supposed to switch to ICD10 years ago, but it keeps getting delayed, mostly because of the arcane field of medical billing software. ICD9 is a half-assed system, based on decades-old knowledge of disease and injury, that you can't even be sure whether you'll find the disease you want under the part of the body it affects or its taxonomy.
So it doesn't surprise me at all that the ICD9 code for ALS is ambiguous for other neurological diseases.
Re:Do tyou know the difference between (Score:3, Interesting)
this and a private medical company?
You find out about the error when a government agency does it.
Not only that... the letter says "You've been diagnosed with X," whereas the letter from the private insurer says, "Your coverage has been terminated" without mention of the (erroneous) diagnosis.