* Long-term medical care counselors are helping severely wounded younger troops at San Diego Naval Medical Center and Camp Pendleton

   * Nearly 255,000 veterans living in Los Angeles, San Diego and Orange counties are between the ages of 65 to 84 and another 283,000 are 45 to 64

   * GAO wants to know how the Department of Veterans Affairs plans to handle looming spikes in demand

GAO: Better Long-Term Health Care Needed for Vets

By Rick Rogers
DefenseTracker.com

The Department of Veterans Affairs is beefing up staffs that handle long-term health care for acutely wounded younger veterans as it grapples with the broader issue of how to take care of aging veterans. 

(See: Notes from the Jan. 23, 2010 meeting of the United Veterans Council of San Diego in Rick's Blog)  

San Diego Naval Medical Center now has two long-term case managers, and another two work at Camp Pendleton.

A 2009 Government Accountability Office audit of VA’s strategic plan for providing institutional care in nursing homes and non-institutional care in veterans’ homes or in the community showed that VA underestimated cost projections and workload assumptions, which could lead to trouble in the future.

The VA estimated that spending for both nursing home and non-institutional care would increase by about $108 million and $165 million, respectively. This would bring the total to $4 billion for nursing home care and $762 million for non-institutional care.
However, the projections were arrived at by assuming that nursing home costs would increase 2.5 percet in that year — a number that GAO suspects is too low.

Most of VA’s spending on long-term care goes for nursing home care, which accounted for approximately 87 percent of VA’s total long-term care spending in fiscal year 2007. (See “Aid & Attendance: a benefit worth getting to know”)

But demand for non-institutional care is expected to soar 167 percent between fiscal years 2007 and 2013 as the veteran population grays. The GAO wants the VA to explain how it plans to deal with this increase. 

According to VA figures, the department provided non-institutional long-term care to 41,022 veterans in 2007, and projects that it will be required to provide such services to over 109,000 by 2013.

Nearly 40 percent of the country’s 23.4 million veterans are 65 or older, according to August 2009 figures from the National Center for Veterans Analysis and Statistics.

Of California’s 2.2 million veterans, 254,983 who live in Southern California are between the ages of 65 and 84 and breakdown like this: Los Angeles County (133,892); Orange County (58,139) and San Diego County (62,952) counties, according to VA figures. Another 283,176 veterans are between the ages of 45 and 64 in those same three counties.

Read GAO the report at: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09145.pdf