Retired Army Col. Steven Miska tells the Tango Alpha Lima podcast how he was about to board a plane when he became charged with implementation of the biggest expansion to VA benefits.
Steven Miska was the type of person U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough was in in search of when they ran into each other at Dulles International Airport. The secretary and his team were looking for what they “affectionally called ’one throat to choke’ – somebody he could lean on anytime something was going wrong with the PACT (Act). So I became that guy,” Miska said.
As this week’s guest on the American Legion Tango Alpha Lima Podcast, Miska talks about his VA role, the status of the PACT Act, and how he thought McDonough and him were going to discuss Afghanistan at the airport.
Miska is the PACT Act’s transitional executive director. In this role, he serves as a senior advisor to the VA Secretary to provide oversight on the development, adoption and implementation of the PACT Act.
“(The VA) needed somebody to spearhead PACT implementation and the policy around that from an integrating perspective, both inside the VA but also with external partners like the White House, Congress, like all the VSOs out there that were really lightening focused on PACT,” he said. “That’s what my team does.”
His team’s role also is to get everyone to “play well together in the sandbox,” Miska said. “Historically, VA has not done a good job at joint ops with the health-care providers working alongside financial, benefits people in order to develop the right policy that was veteran centric. My team, we are a disruptive force in many ways where we need to break bureaucratic inertia. I knew going in that this was going to be culture change.”
Miska noted the VA has received record claims in the last two years: 4.4 million, with 1.7 million being PACT Act-specific. Of those PACT Act claims, 75% are getting approved. The 25% of denials is because there is not a service connection or they don’t have a diagnosis.
It’s the positive stories that have resulted from the PACT Act that make it “meaningful for me to serve in this capacity,” Miska said.
For example, while Miska was speaking at an event in in Durham, N.C., a veteran stood up who shared he had been to six different providers in the private sector. “He knew something was wrong, but nobody could tell him. He filed his PACT claim, got into VA health care and was diagnosed with (a type of) cancer,” said Miska, who also receives his care at the VA even though he was told not to. “How am I supposed to know what our men and women are experiencing if I’m not in the system too. The quality of health care is really solid, and it’s veteran centric.”
With their chance meetup at Dulles, Miska thought his discussion with McDonough was going to center around his continued role with Afghanistan.
Prior to being deployed to Washington, D.C., on the PACT Act mission, Miska served 25 years in the U.S. Army, where he spent 40 months over time in Iraq, serving alongside Iraqi and Afghanistan interpreters. In 2007, on his second of three combat tours, he led a team that established an underground railroad for dozens of interpreters from Baghdad to Amman to the United States. He chronicled this story in his book, “Baghdad Underground Railroad.”
Upon retirement as a colonel, Miska thought he would be spending it in Southern California scuba diving. His wife and daughters told him otherwise. As a result, Miska founded Servant, Leader, Citizen consulting, where he fulfilled his passion in the nonprofit space as a consultant to organization’s helping Iraqi and Afghanistan interpreters and their families with resettlement or getting them out of harm’s way. “Partners we can’t accomplish the mission without,” he said. “We needed each other. We were protecting them, and they were protecting us. All of their family members were at risk.”
Tune in to this episode to hear about Miska’s military operation that inspired his passion for helping Iraq and Afghanistan interpreters, as well as the VA’s research into deployment-related respiratory disease and work with the Department of Defense on repetitive blast injury and the TBI symptoms that manifest as a result.
Also, co-host Stacy Pearsall is back. See what she is rocking as she and co-hosts Adam Marr and Joe Worley discuss:
- A new documentary that created change for homeless veterans in Los Angeles that 100 news stories might not have.
- A new program that’s helping veterans with interviewing, resume writing and networking to help facilitate their next career step.
- The Navy SEAL who will be launched by a rocket into space next year.
Check out this week’s episode, which is among more than 260 Tango Alpha Lima podcasts available in both audio and video formats here. You can also download episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Play or other major podcast-hosting sites. The video version is available at the Legion’s YouTube channel.
- Tango Alpha Lima