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GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS
BY JOHN MITERKO,
CHAIR,
VVA GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS COMMITTEE,
WITH VVA GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS
STAFF
“We recognize that the budget recommendation VVA
is making this year—an increase of $6.9 billion over
the expected fiscal year 2007 appropriation for veterans’ health
care—is extraordinary,” VVA President John Rowan
said in testimony before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs
Feb. 8.
“But with troops in the field, years of under-funding
of health care organizational capacity, renovation of an
archaic and dilapidated infrastructure, updating capital
equipment, continued underestimation of usage by veterans,
particularly returnees from Iraq and Afghanistan, and several
cohorts of war veterans reaching ages of peak health care
utilization, these are extraordinary times,” Rowan
said. “It’s past time to meet these needs.
“The
$2 billion increase the administration has requested for
medical care may almost keep pace with medical inflation,” Rowan
said in testimony submitted for the record. “But it
will not allow VA to enhance its health care or mental health
care services for returning veterans, restore diminished
staff in key disciplines, restore needed long-term care programs
for aging veterans, or allow working-class veterans to return
to their health care system.
“VVA’s recommendation
does accommodate these goals, in addition to restoring eligibility
to veterans exposed to Agent Orange for the care of their
related conditions,” Rowan
said.
Rowan cited the imperative for the VA to have the resources
necessary “to bolster the mental health programs that
should be readily available to serve our young veterans from
Iraq and Afghanistan.” The Department of Defense estimates
that as many as 17 percent of those serving in Iraq “will
have issues requiring them to seek post-deployment mental
health services,” Rowan said, “and recent studies
have shown that four out of five of the veterans who may
need post-deployment care are not properly referred to such
care.”
In the benefits realm, Rowan said, there is the
need for additional vocational rehabilitation specialists
to work with returning service members who are disabled to
help them find and succeed in meaningful work at a living
wage, as well as well-trained and properly supervised adjudicators,
or raters, if the Veterans Benefits Administration is to
have any realistic hope of cutting into the backlog of cases
awaiting adjudication. There simply must be much more real
accountability demanded from VA.
Rowan later echoed his remarks
before the Senate Veterans’ Affairs
Committee.
FILNER ADDRESSES VVA BOD
Among the first acts of the new Democratic leadership when
power passed to them after 12 years of GOP control of Congress
was to reinstate the joint hearings process in which veterans
and military service organizations appear before the Veterans’ Affairs
Committees of both houses.
Joint hearings have traditionally
been held in the spring, after the President submits his
budget request to Congress. The hearings are generally tied
to the veterans’ service
organizations national meetings in Washington, D.C.
“I
am proud of [the] decision to reinstate the joint hearings,” said
Rep. Bob Filner (D- Calif.), the new chair of the House Veterans’ Affairs
Committee. “These
forums provide veterans and military families an opportunity
to voice their concerns and provide guidance to the government
for whom they fought and sacrificed so much. I look forward
to working with the veterans’ community, the administration,
and my colleagues in the House and Senate to provide our
troops, veterans, and military families the benefits and
health care they have earned and deserve.”
Filner began
his tenure in fine fashion, joining VVA’s
officers and Board of Directors at breakfast during the BOD
meeting in January in Silver Spring. Addressing those assembled
at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Filner said: “You all have
educated me” about the needs of veterans and their
families.
After calling the situation faced by homeless veterans “a
moral disgrace for our nation,” Filner promised to
focus attention on mental illness among veterans. And on
the lingering legacy of Agent Orange. And on the need to
provide more benefits for members of the National Guard who
have seen increasing recent call-ups.
Filner promised to make
sure sufficient funding is provided for veterans’ health
care each year. He promised, too, to work in a bipartisan
manner and to run the committee “as
a problem-solving group of people” using, as much as
is practicable, a roundtable format for hearings. The first
hearing, he said, would be on how to reduce the disability
claims backlog that just never seems to get smaller.
VVA expects to work closely with the new chair on issues
of vital interest to veterans and their families.
DEMS TAKE
THE OFFENSIVE
Over on the Senate side, “DoD/VA Collaboration and
Cooperation to Meet the Needs of Returning Service Members” was
the focus at the initial oversight hearing of the Veterans’ Affairs
Committee. It was a session not without a bit of drama.
Gordon Mansfield was seven minutes into his upbeat opening
remarks when Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia interrupted
the VA deputy secretary.
“If I can be bold and slightly
unkind, this is like every other presentation made by any
government agency that I’ve ever heard in 23 years
here,” an obviously
annoyed Rockefeller said.
“You’re telling us all
the good things that are happening. Whether they are or not,
you’re telling
them to us. If you listened to us at all, we weren’t
interested in that. We were interested in what’s happening
to suicides, to mental health, to PTSD, to speediness of
cure and care. You are simply not addressing them.”
Rockefeller
called Mansfield’s statement a farce that
was “totally unresponsive to the committee”—and
to veterans. The packed hearing room on the fourth floor
of the Russell Senate Office Building was stunned.
In his
remarks, David S. C. Chu, Under Secretary of Defense for
Personnel and Readiness, the only other witness to testify,
said he had been misunderstood, or misinterpreted, or misquoted
by the Wall Street Journal when he told a reporter that the
burdensome costs of caring for veterans was affecting the
ability of the nation to defend itself. Chu praised Mansfield
and waxed poetic about his department’s transition-assistance
program.
“It is a different relationship today than
it was six years ago, and I think the reason for that difference
is commitment: commitment by the administration, commitment
by the two cabinet secretaries, commitment by the individuals
up and down the line in the two agencies that are responsible
for our military personnel and the veterans of the United
States,” Chu said.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), in her
remarks, did not let up. “We don’t need a hearing
to discover if we have a seamless transition. I know we don’t.
And we don’t need this hearing to find out if the Pentagon
and the VA are working together or not. I don’t think
they are.
“We do need to use this hearing to find out
from our witnesses what they are doing about it and how they
are going to fix it. And I can tell you one thing: The veterans
I talked to don’t really care about Washington, D.C.,
talk. They care about the reality they see in my state and
across the nation: whether they can get a job, whether they
can get health care, whether they get the benefits they need.
“If
we do want to make progress, I think we have to understand
how we got here, so we can change course. How did we get
to a point where, four years into this war, we have a two-year
backlog for VA benefits, mental health care that’s
inaccessible, and long lines to see a VA doctor? We better
understand how we got here so that we do not make the same
mistakes moving forward.”
Murray was unflinching in
her summation of the administration’s
failures. “The first problem,” she said, “is
that the Bush administration did a miserable job planning
for the aftermath of the war. The failures we’ve seen
in the planning on the military side are mirrored by failures
of planning on the VA side.
“We all know the VA has
some of the best employees in the world, and we’re
very proud of the work they do. But for too long, we’ve
had a VA leadership that has not done an adequate job planning
for the many veterans this war is creating, and the VA is
still woefully behind in its projections. Last year, the
VA planned to see 110,000 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan;
it ended up seeing more than 185,000.
“The second problem
is, the Bush administration has never made a commitment to
fund veterans’ health care
as an essential part of the cost of war. This war is being
paid for by supplementals, but those supplementals do not
include funding for veterans health care. [This] has gone
up, but it’s still not tied to the real needs.”
Mirroring VVA’s “Leave No Veteran Behind” button,
Murray said: “We need to get the VA and the White House
to match the funding for what the real needs are so that
our veterans are not left behind.
“And the third problem
is that we have not been able to get straight answers or
real numbers out of the VA. The Government Accountability
Office has found in report after report that VA has misled
Congress, concealed funding problems, and based its projections
on inaccurate models. That has to change, because our veterans
are paying the price.
“With all due respect to our witnesses,
other officials from your agencies have assured us that everything
was fine when it certainly was not. I was assured many times
that the VA had the funding it needed, only to learn later
that the VA had a $3 billion shortfall and the agency had
falsified budget savings over many years.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont also lambasted the VA. “If
we go to war, I think what we have to understand is that
the cost of war does not stop the day that the war ends,” he
said. “The cost of war stops when the last veteran
stops needing benefits and the help that they should receive
as a result of their service to this country.
“Let’s
be very blunt about it,” Sanders
said. “We had a major problem in the VA before the
Iraq war began. Before the Iraq war began, in my state and
all over this country, there were very long waiting lists
to get into the VA system. Now, how could that be? How could
people who put their lives on the line defending this country
have to wait month after month after month to get the health
care that they need?
“How could it happen that the Bush
administration, in order to save money, would throw hundreds
of thousands of Category 8 veterans off of VA entirely, so
that a 90-year-old veteran who calls my office and served
in World War II can’t
get into the VA because he is ‘too wealthy,’ earning
more than $27,000 a year?
“This,” Sanders intoned, “is a national
disgrace.”
If this seems to be a venting ground for
disgruntled Democrats, readers ought to know that, in addition
to Sen. Akaka, six of his Democratic colleagues—Rockefeller,
Murray, Sherrod Brown, Jim Webb, and Barack Obama—attended
the hearing. On the other side of the aisle, only Larry Craig
of Idaho, now ranking member of the committee, bothered to
show up.
MONEY FOR VETERANS’ HEALTH CARE
Although the leadership in the House and Senate has determined
that the only way to manage the budget is to operate the
FY’07 appropriations by continuing resolution, veterans’ health
care will not suffer—if the legislators enact and if
the president signs into law legislation that will boost
funding by some $3.6 billion in the current fiscal year.
Because this is the first budget initiated by the Democrats,
HVAC chairman Bob Filner said it was particularly important
to do the right thing for veterans.
“They are to be
applauded for making good on their word to the VSOs,” said
VVA President John Rowan. “Despite
the constraints on domestic and discretionary spending, veterans
will not be unduly penalized because of what had been an
impasse over spending levels for veterans affairs.”
LAWYERS
FOR VETERANS
VVA has long supported the rights of veterans to be represented
in the claims process. Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) made it
happen as chair of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs
during the 109th Congress.
Almost immediately after the President
signed this landmark legislation, there were grumblings.
Many VSOs are opposed, fearing that having the option to
hire lawyers will steer veterans seeking representation away
from their services and into unnecessary and costly arrangements.
NUMBERS
GAME
First, in the particular vernacular of the Pentagon, MIAs
were renamed DUSTWUNs in the current GWOT, the acronym for
Global War on Terrorism. No longer is a GI missing in action;
rather he is a DUSTWUN, which stands for “Duty
Status Whereabouts Unknown.”
And now, with the fighting
in Iraq officially lasting longer than the American participation
in World War II, the deep thinkers in the Pentagon are refiguring
the way in which casualty totals are given.
In Vietnam, two
sets of books were kept on those who died: For every four
to five KIAs—Killed In Action—there
was one casualty who died in-country from accident or illness.
Was this an honest attempt to tell the truth about American
losses, or was it a blatant attempt to minimize the numbers
of those who died in the war? And what of this newest reconfiguration
by the Pentagon?
What moved the bureaucrats in the Pentagon
to change definitions in mid-war? As Grady reported: “Concern
about public perceptions of the wounded increased last month
after Linda Bilmes, a Harvard professor, published an opinion
article in The Los Angeles Times mentioning 50,508 ‘nonmortal
woundings’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. That number,” Grady
wrote, came from a web page posted by public affairs employees
at the VA.
“But officials from both agencies said that
figure had been posted by mistake,” Grady continued, “lumping
combat and noncombat injuries as well as illnesses and labeling
them all ‘woundings’ instead of casualties.
“‘If
public affairs people at the VA misunderstood,’” she
quoted Michael Kilpatrick, deputy director of force health
protection and readiness at DoD, “‘we thought
the public would misunderstand it, too.’”
What
the public cannot help but understand is that “shock
and awe” has long since given way to a protracted guerrilla
war in which improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are the
face and stamp of the insurgents. And revised nomenclature
cannot hide the human costs of this war.
The bottom line is:
Whether a GI is wounded in a firefight or injured driving
a Humvee, in Iraq or stateside, the true cost of war cannot
be hidden. During the Civil War, and during the First World
War, more American soldiers died of disease and unsanitary
conditions than were felled by enemy ordnance.
DoD on HEALTH
CARE: WHAT’S MISSING?
On Tuesday, February 20, the surgeon general of the Army,
Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, M.D., was one of four presenters
to DoD’s Health Care Task Force. In his PowerPoint
presentation, Gen. Kiley spoke with vigor and with confidence
about his mission and areas of emphasis. He employed slides
of charts and graphs galore. He indicated great pride in
the advances being made in military medical care.
Conspicuously
absent from his presentation, however, was any mention about
the disheartening and indeed scandalous conditions at the “crown
jewel” of the military’s
health care institutions: Walter Reed Army Medical Center
in Washington, D.C.
Indeed, as a series that week in The Washington
Post illuminated appalling conditions faced by recuperating
war fighters—that’s
the new jargon at the Pentagon for soldier, sailor, marine,
flier, et al.— and their families on the WRAMC campus,
the Army’s
top doc said nary a word about it in his prepared remarks.
Thankfully,
the glare of publicity is having a salutary effect. Brass
at Walter Reed are falling all over themselves to repair
the damage—not only to the buildings and living quarters,
but to the reputation of this stalwart institution.
A few
years back, in the first year of the fighting in Iraq, Steve
Robinson, then executive director of the National Gulf War
Resource Center, represented VVA in exposing similarly deplorable
conditions at Fort Stewart, Georgia. What has been happening
at WRAMC is simply more of the same. The conditions exposed
by journalists Dana Priest and Anne Hull should have come
as no shock to anyone, particularly those in charge of Army
medical operations.
Hence, those claiming no knowledge of
what they should have known about does not ring true. For
these conditions to have festered as long as they did, with
little or nothing done to correct them until the glare of
publicity got rather too bright, is scandalous. The real
questions should be: What did Gen. Kiley and Gen. George
Weightman, commanding officer at Walter Reed, know and when
did they know it? And why did it take stories in the media
to stimulate corrective action?
We can recall in the late ’60s
and early ’70s
when a series of reports uncovered deplorable conditions
at VA medical centers. It was these reports that galvanized
the Veterans Administration to address the problem. Too bad
DoD didn’t learn the VA’s lesson.
COMING SOON:
23 NEW VET CENTERS
The VA Vet Center program, which provides readjustment counseling
and outreach services to veterans, is expanding into 23 new
communities across the nation in the next two years.
New Vet
Centers will be located in Montgomery, Alabama; Fayetteville,
Arkansas; Modesto, California; Grand Junction, Colorado;
Orlando, Fort Myers, and Gainesville, Florida; Macon, Georgia;
Manhattan, Kansas; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Cape Cod, Massachusetts;
Saginaw and Iron Mountain, Michigan; Berlin, New Hampshire;
Las Cruces, New Mexico; Binghamton, Middletown, Nassau County,
and Watertown, New York; Toledo, Ohio; Du Bois, Pennsylvania;
Killeen, Texas; and Everett, Washington.
During 2007, the
VA plans to open new facilities in Grand Junction, Orlando,
Cape Cod, Iron Mountain, Berlin, and Watertown. The other
new centers are scheduled to open in 2008. Currently, VA
maintains 209 Vet Centers in all 50 states, the District
of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
VVA
has long been a proponent of the Vet Center program. Our
only concern is this: Will the new, and the old, Vet Centers
be adequately funded? Will they have counselors who are in
tune to family and bereavement issues? We maintain that the
Vet Center program needs 300 additional, permanent professional
staff members skilled in bereavement, mental health, and
family counseling.
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©2006-
2008, Vietnam Veterans of America. All Rights Reserved. 8605 Cameron
Street, Silver Spring, MD 20910