Just weeks before senior officials at the Veterans Health Administration ordered the launch of a new Online Health Care Application through Vets.gov, a senior policy adviser at the White House warned VHA officials that the new app had not been cleared by agency lawyers because of legal and technical issues that, ultimately, affected veteran enrollment across the nation. […]

In August, as President Barack Obama stood in front of the Disabled American Veterans Convention and publicly hailed the success of a new health care enrollment app on Vets.gov, the system had actually been spinning out of control for months, losing thousands of applications, locking records, and allowing officials to mark veterans ineligible for benefits without legal justification, according to hundreds of pages of internal documents obtained by MeriTalk. […]