OKC VA as primary insurance

[dennishoddy]

There are issues with outsourcing. It's going to have to be better than it is now.
Obama started the choice program for vets that live more than 40 miles from a VA provider or hospital. It became an abject failure because of the mountains of paperwork required for the civilian provider to be compensated for their services, and payment was so difficult to get that they just wrote it off or never collected. Every minute detail had to be pre-approved. If not the Veteran had to pay from their pocket. Payments were so difficult that providers were turning them over to collection agencies.
President Trump streamlined the program making it much easier to use, but it's still junk IMHO.
I'm priority 1 Service Connected and live 100 miles from the nearest VA hospital. I get travel pay, so a day trip to OKC isn't that big of a deal.
My provider has a procedure that he wants to run that would require me to be in the OKC VA at 0700 start the procedure and be complete at 1600 hrs. Asked if I could use the Choice program at our local hospital. They said sure, those Choice folks would get a referral from the VA and would contact me directly. Three weeks went by before the Choice program people called, and said that wasn't available at our local hospital. The closest would be OKC or Tulsa. Since we have relatives in the Tulsa area I could stay at, I told them Tulsa. That was two weeks ago. After calling repeatedly they said they couldn't find anyone in Tulsa. So, 5 weeks later its still not done.
If staying with the VA in OKC originally, it would have been done a month ago.
What a joke of a program.

Update on the Choice Program. It's now December 26, and the Choice Program is still in charge with no results to get the test done.
When the VA refers you to the Choice Program, they become your health care provider. The VA is out of the picture at that point.
After more multiple calls to their call center trying to refuse the Choice Program and get back into the VA, it becomes more of a clusterfawk. If you talk to two different people on different days, they have no clue what you told the other person in the call center just two days before. Repeated requests to change the referral back to the VA appear to fall on deaf ears, and the call center records do not reflect my calls to them between different workers records.
Repeated calls to the VA about this issue have been sympathetic but they just have to go by the rules handed to them. They can't do anything until the referral is sent back to them.
Last call this afternoon I got a phone number I shouldn't probably have been given. See what tomorrow will bring.

 

[tRidiot]

Wowzers. You're right.... what a clusterfawk.