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ByMatthewDaly AssociatedPress WASHINGTON More than 57,000 U.S. military veter- ans have been waiting 90 days or more for their first VA medical appointments, and an additional 64,000 appear to have fallen through the cracks, never getting appointments after enrolling and requesting them, the Veterans Affairs Department said Monday. It's not just a backlog problem, the wide-rang- ing review indicated. Thir- teen percent of schedulers in the facility-by-facility re- port on 731 hospitals and outpatient clinics reported being told by supervisors to falsify appointment sched- ules to make patient waits appear shorter. The audit is the first na- tionwide look at the VA network in the uproar that began with reports two months ago of patients dying while awaiting ap- pointments and of cover- ups at the Phoenix VA cen- ter. A preliminary review last month found that long patient waits and falsified records were "systemic" throughout the VA medical network, the nation's larg- est single health care pro- vider serving nearly 9 mil- lion veterans. "This behavior runs counter to our core values," the report said. "The over- arching environment and culture which allowed this state of practice to take root must be confronted head- on." Acting VA Secretary Sloan Gibson said Mon- day that VA officials have contacted 50,000 veter- ans across the country to get them off waiting lists and into clinics and are in the process of contacting 40,000 more. The controversy forced VA Secretary Eric Shinseki to resign May 30. Shinseki took the blame for what he decried as a "lack of integ- rity" through the network. Legislation is being written in both the House and Sen- ate to allow more veterans who can't get timely VA ap- pointments to see doctors listed as providers under Medicare or the military's TRICARE program. The proposals also would make it easier to fire senior VA re- gional officials and hospital administrators. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the report demonstrated that Congress must act imme- diately. "The fact that more than 57,000 veterans are still waiting for their first doc- tor appointment from the VA is a national disgrace," Boehner said. The new audit said a 14- day agency target for wait- ing times was "not attain- able," given poor planning and a growing demand for VA services. It called the 2011 decision by senior VA officials to set the target, and then base bonuses on meeting it, "an organiza- tional leadership failure." A previous inspector general's investigation into the troubled Phoenix VA Health Care System found that about 1,700 veterans in need of care were "at risk of being lost or forgotten" af- ter being kept off an official, electronic waiting list. The report issued Mon- day offers a broader pic- ture of the overall system. The audit includes inter- views with more than 3,772 employees nationwide be- tween May 12 and June 3. Respondents at 14 sites re- ported having been sanc- tioned or punished over scheduling practices. Wait times for new pa- tients far exceeded the 14- day goal, the audit said. For example, the wait time for primary care screening ap- pointment at Baltimore's VA health care center was al- most 81 days. At Canandaigua, New York, it was 72 days. On the other hand, at Coatesville, Pennsylvania, it was only 17 days and in Bedford, Mas- sachusetts just 12 days. The longest wait was in Hono- lulu — 145 days. But for veterans already in the system, waits were much shorter. For example, established patients at VA facilities in New Jersey, Connecticut and Battle Creek, Michi- gan, waited an average of only one day to see health care providers. The longest average wait for veterans al- ready in the system was 30 days, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a military-heavy region with Fort Bragg Army Base and Pope Air Force Base nearby. Gibson, the acting VA secretary, said the depart- ment is hiring new work- ers at overburdened clinics and other health care facil- ities across the nation and is deploying mobile medical units to treat additional vet- erans. The VA believes it will need $300 million over the next three months to accel- erate medical care for vet- erans who have been wait- ing for appointments, a se- nior agency official said in a conference call with re- porters. That effort would include expanding clinics' hours and paying for some veterans to see non-VA pro- viders. The official said he could not say how many ad- ditional health providers the VA would need to im- prove its service. The report said 112 — or 15 percent — of the 731 VA facilities that auditors vis- ited will require additional investigation, because of in- dications that data on pa- tients' appointment dates may have been falsified, or that workers may have been instructed to falsify lists, or other problems. Gibson also has ordered a hiring freeze at the Wash- ington headquarters of the Veterans Health Adminis- tration, the VA's health care arm, and at 21 regional ad- ministrative offices, except for critical positions per- sonally approved by him. Boehner said the House would act on legislation this week to allow veterans waiting at least a month for VA appointments to see non-VA doctors, and said the Senate should approve it, too. An emerging biparti- san compromise in the Sen- ate is broader than that, but senators have yet to vote on it. Associated Press writers Donna Cassata and Alan Fram contributed to this story. AUDIT RESULTS Morethan57,000awaitfirstVAappointment APPHOTO/VALLEYMORNINGSTAR,DAVIDPIKE This photo shows the VA Health Care Center in Harlingen, Texas. The medical center ranks high on the list of the facilities with the longest average waits as of May 15 for new patients seeking primary care, specialist care and mental health care, according to audit results released Monday. By Lauran Neergaard AP Medical Writer WASHINGTON In one of the most ambitious attempts yet to thwart Alzheimer's disease, a major study got underway Monday to see if an experimental drug can protect healthy seniors whose brains harbor silent signs that they're at risk. Scientists plan to eventu- ally scan the brains of thou- sands of older volunteers in the U.S., Canada and Aus- tralia to find those with a sticky build-up believed to play a key role in develop- ment of Alzheimer's — the first time so many people without memory problems get the chance to learn the potentially troubling news. Having lots of that gunky protein called beta- amyloid doesn't guarantee someone will get sick. But the big question: Could in- tervening so early make a difference for those who do? "We have to get them at the stage when we can save their brains," said Dr. Reisa Sperling of Boston's Brigham and Women's Hos- pital and Harvard Medical School, who is leading the huge effort to find out. Researchers are just be- ginning to recruit volun- teers, and on Monday, a Rhode Island man was hooked up for an IV in- fusion at Butler Hospi- tal in Providence, the first treated. Peter Bristol, 70, of Wakefield, Rhode Island, figured he was at risk be- cause his mother died of Al- zheimer's and his brother has it. "I felt I needed to be pro- active in seeking whatever therapies might be avail- able for myself in the com- ing years," said Bristol, who said he was prepared when a PET scan of his brain showed he harbored enough amyloid to qualify for the research. "Just because I have it doesn't mean I'm go- ing to get Alzheimer's," he stressed. But Bristol and his wife are "going into the sit- uation with our eyes wide open." He won't know un- til the end of the so-called A4 Study — it stands for Anti-Amyloid Treatment in Asymptomatic Alzheim- er's — whether he received monthly infusions of the experimental medicine, Eli Lilly & Co.'s solanezumab, or a dummy drug. Solanezumab is designed to help catch amyloid be- fore it builds into the brain plaques that are a hallmark of Alzheimer's. It failed in earlier studies to treat full- blown Alzheimer's — but it did appear to help slow mental decline in patients with mild disease, raising interest in testing it even earlier. Scientists now think Al- zheimer's begins ravag- ing the brain at least a de- cade before memory prob- lems appear, much like heart disease is triggered by quiet cholesterol build- up. Many believe the best chance of preventing or at least slowing the dis- ease requires intervening, somehow, when people still appear healthy. The $140 million study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, Lilly and others, will track if participants' memory and amyloid lev- els change over three years. Whether this particu- lar drug works or not, the Alzheimer's study is being watched closely as a chance to learn more about how amyloid works and how people handle the uncer- tainty of knowing it's there. "Amyloid we know is a huge risk factor, but some- one can have a head full of amyloid and not decline" mentally, Sperling said. "We need to understand more about why some brains are resilient and some are not." Before any brain scans, interested 65- to 85-year- olds will undergo cognitive tests to be sure their mem- ory is normal. Volunteers also must be willing to learn their amyloid levels, and researchers can turn away those whose psycho- logical assessments suggest they may not cope well with the news. Sperling expects to screen more than 5,000 healthy seniors to find the needed 1,000 participants, who will be monitored for anxiety or distress. "It is breaking new ground," said Dr. Laurie Ryan of the NIH's National Institute on Aging. "We re- ally do have to understand how that affects people." More than 35 million people worldwide have Al- zheimer's or similar demen- tia, including about 5 mil- lion in the U.S., numbers expected to rise rapidly as the baby boomers age. Alzheimer's affects 1 in 9 people over age 65, and about a third of those 85 and older, according to the Alzheimer's Association. Today's medications only temporarily ease some symptoms, and sci- entists don't even know exactly how the disease forms. A leading theory is that amyloid plaques kick off the disease but tangles of a second protein, named tau, speed up the brain de- struction. As scientists shift their attention to the still healthy, a few studies are under way to try blocking Alzheimer's in people ge- netically at risk to get a form of the disease that runs in their families. STUDY Healthy seniors tested in bid to block Alzheimer's ASSOCIATED PRESS Peter Bristol of Wakefield, R.I. receives an intravenous infusion at Butler Hospital in Providence, R.I., Monday. Bristol is part of a major study that got under way Monday to see if an experimental drug could protect outwardly healthy seniors whose brains harbor silent signs that they're at risk for Alzheimer's disease. Associated Press WASHINGTON The Su- preme Court ruled Mon- day that a group of home- owners in North Carolina can't sue a company that contaminated their drink- ing water decades ago be- cause a state deadline has lapsed, a decision that could prevent thousands of other property owners in similar cases from recovering dam- ages after being exposed to toxic waste. In a 7-2 decision, the jus- tices said state law strictly bars any lawsuit brought more than 10 years after the contamination occurred — even if residents did not re- alize their water was pol- luted until years later. The high court reversed a lower court ruling that said federal environmental laws should trump the state law and allow the lawsuit against electronics manu- facturer CTS Corp. to pro- ceed. The decision is a set- back for the families of sev- eral thousand former North Carolina-based Marines su- ing the federal government in a separate case for expos- ing them to contaminated drinking water over several decades at Camp Lejeune. The government is rely- ing on the same state law to avoid liability. That case is currently pending at the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. The ruling on Monday in- volves property owners liv- ing on land where CTS used to make electronics equip- ment until it sold the prop- erty in 1987. It wasn't until 2009 that residents discov- ered their well water con- tained chemicals that can cause health problems. 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