Congress

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VA Disability Claims For Sleep Apnea Skyrocket To Over $1.2 Billion Per Year

Caroline May | Daily Caller | June 4, 2013

The Department of Veterans Affairs is reportedly spending over $1.2 billion per year to treat sleep apnea, leading one attorney to call on Congress to investigate. Read More »

VA Halts All Software Development

Bob Brewin | Nextgov | October 8, 2013

The Veterans Affairs Department halted all software development Tuesday, including work on its $491 million paperless Veterans Benefits Management System. The news came a day after the department furloughed 2,754 information technology employees due to the lapse in appropriations. Read More »

VA Pays $200 Million For Nearly 1,000 Veterans’ Wrongful Deaths

Aaron Glantz | The Daily Beast | April 3, 2014

Since 9/11 almost 1,000 veterans have died due to negligence in the veterans health-care system. After lengthy legal battles the VA is finally making payments to their families.

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VA Says Claims Backlog Down 36 Percent Since March

Diana Manos | Government Health IT | December 18, 2013

Department of Veterans Affairs’ Under Secretary for Benefits Allison Hickey says the Veterans Benefits Administration is putting a big dent in the backlog of Veterans’ disability compensation and pension claims. In fact, the VBA has cut the backlog by 36 percent since last March, she told a recent hearing of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, Read More »

VA, DoD Get Tighter Leash With iEHR Cash

Erin McCann | Healthcare IT News | January 16, 2014

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill again expressed concern over the botched development and higher-than-expected price tag of creating a seamlessly integrated electronic health record between the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, ultimately tacking on project funding restrictions in the House's Omnibus Appropriations Act passed Wednesday afternoon. Read More »

VA, DOD Must Present EHR Interoperability Plan In January

Jennifer Bresnick | EHR Intelligence | December 13, 2013

The clock is ticking for the military’s on-again, off-again plan for EHR interoperability.  The 2014 National Defense Authorization Act, finalized by Congress on Wednesday, demands a detailed plan from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense outlining how exactly they will achieve adequate health information exchange. Read More »

VA, DoD On Tighter Leash With iEHR

Erin McCann | Healthcare IT News | May 15, 2013

Members of Congress are lauding a bipartisan bill that limits funding for an integrated electronic health record system between VA and DoD and requires aggressive progress updates from both agencies, which have, in recent months, come under fire for the dilatory pace at which they're moving forward with the iEHR. Read More »

VA, DoD Owe EHR Plan To Congress By End Of January

Dan Bowman | FierceEMR | December 13, 2013

Funding legislation agreed to by the House and Senate this week mandates that the U.S. Departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense present a plan for building either an interoperable or single electronic health record by the end of January. Read More »

VanRoekel On Infosec And Sequestration

Eric Chabrow | BankInfoSecurity.com | January 14, 2013

With Congress facing $1.2 trillion in budget cuts, Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel says funding for cybersecurity initiatives will likely be affected. But with smart planning, government information technology should not be placed at risk. Read More »

VA’s Claims Backlog Continues To Push 900,000

Bob Brewin | Nextgov | September 21, 2012

The Veterans Affairs Department processed more than 1 million disability claims in fiscal 2012. The backlog of pending claims continued to hover just under the 900,000 mark with almost 600,000 in the system in for more than 125 days. Read More »

Veterans Affairs, Defense Depts. Spend Billions In Effort To Coordinate Records

Hannah Winston | The Center for Public Integrity | August 27, 2013

After two years and more than $1 billion spent, integrated health records system canceled Read More »

VFW Disgusted With Elected Leadership

Staff Writer | Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) | October 9, 2013

The nation’s oldest and largest war veterans’ organization is disgusted with the partisan bickering and government paralysis caused by a White House and Congress who will not budge from their ideological extremes in order to properly take care of America’s true heroes. Read More »

Watchdog Finds More Than $1T In Misreported Federal Spending

Camille Tuutti | FCW | February 6, 2013

The Department of Health and Human Services tops the list of the agencies most delinquent in reporting spending on USASpending.gov, with nearly $800 billion in unreported funds, according to a watchdog group. Read More »

We Paid Over $500 Million For The Obamacare Sites And All We Got Was This Lousy 404 [Updated]

Andrew Couts | Digital Trends | October 8, 2013

It’s been one full week since the flagship technology portion of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) went live. And since that time, the befuddled beast that is Healthcare.gov has shutdown, crapped out, stalled, and mis-loaded so consistently that its track record for failure is challenged only by Congress. Read More »

What A Destructive Wall Street Owes Young Americans

Ralph Nader | Huffington Post | March 14, 2014

Wall Street's big banks and their financial networks that collapsed the U.S. economy in 2008-2009 were saved with huge bailouts by the taxpayers, but these Wall Street gamblers are still paid huge money, and are again creeping toward reckless misbehavior. Their corporate crime wave strip-mined the economy for young workers, threw them on the unemployment rolls and helped make possible a low-wage economy that is draining away their ability to afford basic housing, goods and services. 

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