Legion to Congress: VA budget must meet critical needs

The House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs held a hearing Feb. 10 to examine the Department of Veterans Affairs budget request for Fiscal Year 2017.

Prior to the hearing, The American Legion submitted written testimony for the record.

The Legion’s statement examined current issues and projected needs – in lieu of taking the historical and problematic approach of presenting a budget based on a number – directing the committee’s focus to three critical areas:

• Consolidation of outside care

• Ensuring VA’s medical hiring needs are met

• Addressing the rising backlog of appeals

As a temporary emergency measure under the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act of 2014, the VA implemented the Choice Card program as a viable solution to an increase in patient wait times nationwide.

The American Legion supported the program after seeing the need for it firsthand while conducting numerous Veterans Crisis Command Centers in affected areas from Arizona to North Carolina.

Not only did the Choice Card program provide an immediate short term option, it also provided an opportunity to learn from how veterans utilized the program. Ultimately, that led to a proposal to consolidate the VA’s community care programs, streamlining them into a New Veterans Choice Program.

Keeping current and future budget constraints in mind, there are two important considerations revolving around this new transformation that must be implemented in future budgets. VA must have the ability to spend all community care funds under the new framework, and the additional funding required to provide for the Choice Card program needs to be factored into future budgets.

While a robust budget for VA medical care is necessary, the past few years have shown the VA has been dependent upon care in the community to provide timely care to veterans when they are overburdened by scheduling, staffing and a lack of appropriate resources. This needs to be reflected in the community care budgets, not as an emergency measure when the problem boils over and out of control.

Detailed attention must be paid to VA’s hiring and incentives. If additional resources are needed to secure key providers like psychologists and physician’s assistants, the Veterans Health Administration must be provided the funding needed to secure those key performers. That is the longterm key to ensuring veterans get the care they need in a timely fashion in the system that is designed to treat their unique wounds of war.

Last year, The American Legion noted that occasional mandatory overtime in a short-term crisis is prudent management. However, four straight years is indicative of an organization that is clearly understaffed. VA was supposed to “break the back of the backlog” of veterans’ claims for disability benefits in 2015.

While VA has made substantial progress in reducing the number of initial claims – the “claims backlog” sits at around 77,000 claims. Down from a peak of over 600,000 claims in early 2013 – those numbers do not reflect the waiting period for many veterans who have been waiting for three or more years for their appeals to be decided.

Whether it is appeals or initial claims, a backlog is a backlog, and the budget must reflect sufficient resources to address these claims.

The VA cannot afford to be run as an entity reactive to one crisis after another. While there are other areas that can benefit from predicting crises before they occur, the Legion’s suggestions represent a key start in the sort of thinking that must be adopted to make VA successful in the long run.