Kentucky Veterans! Do You Have Health and Benefits Questions? Need Peer Support? Ask Questions Now!

I very rarely have any problems with medical treatment from VAMC Louisville -- the quality of medical care is almost always top notch, all the issues I have encountered with the VA have been either administrative, billing, or the occasional ridiculous policy with a complete inability for anyone to do what they admit they know would be the right solution.

A classic example was the time that a provider at VAMC Louisville called in a lab order for a follow up blood test to the Army lab at Fort Knox. This is the lab that did all the lab tests for the VA Clinic at Fort Knox, billing the VA - and in fact this was the lab that had done the lab test that this was a follow-up for. The Army lab at Fort Knox accepted the order with no problems when it was called in. They performed the test with no problems. Then they billed me instead of the VA. Why? Because the test was ordered by a VA doctor at VAMC Louisville, not one of the VA doctors working at the VA clinic on Fort Knox. No sweat, I sent the bill to the VAMC who said they would take care of it. HA! Fat Chance! VAMC Louisville could not figure out how to pay the Army without receiving a bill to the VA from the Army. The Army refused to bill the VA because their agreement only covered the VA doctors listed as working at the VA clinic on Fort Knox. Over six months of each blaming the other, with the Army saying that the VA in Louisville wasn't authorized to order the test, and the VA saying that the Army lab should not have accepted the order if they weren't authorized to order the test. Twice the problem was supposed to have been "handled" by the VA Patient Advocate's office (both times they just sent a copy of the bill to the VA billing department and forgot about it). A Congressional Inquiry eventually got the VA billing department to actually pay the bill. Just the people who I know spent time working on this totaled at least a hundred times the amount of money that the Army and the VA were fighting about, because the charge had only been $10.

At least THAT problem won't happen again, because instead of finding a better way for the VA and the Army to work together, the solution has been for the VA to build an entire new building and hire more people to move the clinic out of the Army hospital and to have their own building and their own lab.