BLUE RIDGE, Ga. — Channel 2 Action News Investigates is looking into a 13-week wait for an appointment that ER doctors say a veteran needed within 24 hours.
For a year, an American Legion service officer has been trying to get the records on how the Atlanta VA is handling community care referrals after disabled veteran Richard Mulligan’s incident.
"I was supposed to have a follow-up within 24 hours. That did not happen,“ Mulligan told Channel 2 Consumer Investigator Justin Gray.
Instead, it took 13 weeks for Mulligan, 81, to get an appointment with a primary care doctor.
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"Everybody I spoke to, daily in the beginning, said it’s pending. I said, ‘It’s not pending. It doesn’t take this long to pend,’" he said.
The former Marine combat medic was referred from the ER with debilitating back pain.
“I was told, ‘No, we can’t see you. There’s not an opening. We cannot see you until September,’ and this is June,” Mulligan said.
VA policy says you are eligible to see a doctor outside the VA through community care if the wait is longer than 20 days.
“It was cruel,” Mulligan recalled.
Gray checked primary care wait times at the Cobb VA Clinic that Mulligan was working with. Currently, the average is 15 days for established patients and 69 days for new patients.
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The VA shared a statement that read,
“This Veteran’s community care referral was delayed in part because his access to community care had to be reauthorized last year. The Atlanta VA Health Care System regrets this delay.”
American Legion service officer Jim Lindenmayer filed Freedom of Information Act requests for information on how the VA is handling these referrals after this incident.
“We should be able to find how many others were rejected, how many of those never took place, how many veterans just abandoned,” Lindenmayer said.
Mulligan didn’t wait on the VA. Instead, he paid out of pocket to see a doctor and was eventually diagnosed with prostate cancer.
His church is helping him pay for that treatment outside of the VA.
The VA says they are implementing something new, called the External Provider Scheduling System, which is helping. It allows staff to access the schedules of community care providers and immediately book appointments for veterans that fit their schedules.
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