VA building projects riddled with mistakes and cost overruns

There are hospital doors at the half-built ­Veterans Affairs medical center outside Denver that were supposed to cost $100 each but ended up ­running $1,400. There’s a $100-million-and-still-risingprice tag for an atrium and concourse with curving blond-wood walls and towering glass windows. And entire rooms that had to be refashioned because requests for medical equipment changed at the last minute and in other cases the equipment didn’t fit. No one had bothered to measure.

Not even completed yet, this $1.7 billion facility is already among the most expensive hospitals in the world, and it’s just one of several VA hospital projects that are greatly over budget and behind schedule, according to the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

“Everything that could have gone wrong did. It’s just an astounding price tag,” said David Wise, who wrote in a GAO report about the Aurora project and VA construction problems in Orlando, Las Vegas and New Orleans.

Read the full article at The Washington Post.