1. National Media Coverage of the Veterans Affairs Waitlist Scandal
- Author
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Audrey L. Jones, Susan Zickmund, Michael J. Fine, Roslyn A. Stone, Kelly H. Burkitt, Leslie R. M. Hausmann, and Peter Taber
- Subjects
Adult ,Male ,Waiting Lists ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Ethnic group ,Media coverage ,Legislation ,race and ethnicity ,Trust ,Health Services Accessibility ,Mean difference ,03 medical and health sciences ,Sex Factors ,0302 clinical medicine ,Linear spline ,Health care ,Ethnicity ,Humans ,sex ,Medicine ,veterans ,030212 general & internal medicine ,Veterans Affairs ,health care economics and organizations ,Aged ,media_common ,Distrust ,business.industry ,Communications Media ,030503 health policy & services ,Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health ,Original Articles ,Middle Aged ,Patient Acceptance of Health Care ,United States ,humanities ,United States Department of Veterans Affairs ,Veterans Health Services ,ComputingMethodologies_DOCUMENTANDTEXTPROCESSING ,Female ,distrust ,0305 other medical science ,business ,Demography - Abstract
Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text., Background: On April 23, 2014, US media outlets broadcast reports of excessive wait times and “secret” waitlists at some Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals, precipitating legislation to increase Veterans’ access to private sector health care. Objective: The aims were to assess changes in Veterans’ distrust in the VA health care system before and after the media coverage and explore sex and racial/ethnic differences in the temporal patterns. Methods: Veterans completed semistructured interviews on health care satisfaction from June 2013 to January 2015, including a validated scale of health system distrust (range: 1–5). We used linear splines with knots at 90-day intervals to assess changes in distrust before and after April 23, 2014 (“day 0”) in linear mixed models. To explore sex and racial/ethnic differences in temporal patterns, we stratified models by sex and tested for interactions of race/ethnicity with time. Results: For women (n=600), distrust scores (mean=2.09) increased by 0.45 in days 0–90 (P
- Published
- 2021