Months after the Veterans Administration scandal exploded in the headlines, top officials are still lying and hiding information from Congress and President Obama is actively trying to roll back the freedom of veterans to seek health care outside of the government system.
That’s the conclusion of Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kans., a member of the House Veterans Affairs Committee.
Last May, the VA was rocked by reports that veterans were forced to wait months for routine medical appointments and that some officials were doctoring hospital and medical records to cover up the failure to provide care. In response, Veterans Affairs Secretary Gen. Eric Shinseki resigned and Congress approved legislation giving future secretaries more freedom to remove ineffective personnel. Former Procter & Gamble Chairman Robert McDonald was eventually confirmed to succeed Shinseki and lead major reform efforts.
Are there signs of improvement?
On Monday evening, the House Veterans Affairs Committee grilled VA General Counsel Leigh Bradley over why more than 100 separate requests for information from the committee have gone unanswered for months and why the information that is given is often found to be false.
“The news only gets worse and worse,” said Huelskamp.
According to Associated Press reports on the hearing, committee chairman Jeff Miller, R-Fla., expressed deep frustration with the VA’s lack of cooperation on key facts, including wait times for veterans at the Phoenix hospital where the scandal began.
“Let there be no mistake or misunderstanding: When this committee requests documents, I expect production to be timely, complete and accurate,” said Miller.
Huelskamp is particularly incensed at the falsehoods coming out of the VA, including one stated by Secretary McDonald on NBC’s “Meet the Press”.
“They have falsified information and it is not just lying to members of Congress, it’s lying to the American people. We even had the secretary about a month ago lie on national television and claim that he had fired sixty employees that made up, falsified, cooked the books on wait times for our vulnerable veterans,” said Huelskamp.
The real number was nowhere near that high.
“He only fired four. There’s a big difference between four and sixty, so there’s a lack of trust there. But this is, more importantly, a lack of trust between veterans who deserve their care and whether they’re getting in on time and whether they’re getting the proper care,” said Huelskamp.
And the congressman says the lies don’t stop there.
“The VA claimed that at the (Los Angeles) veterans facility, the wait was only four days. We found out later, according to a CNN report, that it’s more than 30 days. Who do you believe” Who I believe is the veteran. If the veteran says they’ve been waiting, that’s what happens,” said Huelskamp.
Huelskamp says when Congress tries to separate fact from fiction, the massive VA bureaucracy grinds investigations to a halt.
“We’ve had, I think, three secretaries of the VA in my four years here. For secretary after secretary and undersecretary after undersecretary, I didn’t know that had that many undersecretaries. They always send a new one over and the answer is always, ‘We’ll get back to you. We’ll get that answer to you,'” said Huelskamp.
“We have documented where they have lied to the committee, where they have falsified information,” he said.
If anything good came out of the VA scandal, Huelskamp believes it is the provision within last year’s reform bill that allows veterans to access care outside of the government system in order to shorten how long they wait for care. The congressman says expanded choice is working well for veterans and no longer forces many of them to travel hundreds of miles to approved doctors and facilities. He says that change is further proof the less government is involved in our health care, the better that care will be.
“That’s the best government health care you can get, and what we saw in Phoenix and around the country is that it’s been an abysmal failure,” said Huelskamp.
While the expanded health care choices may be popular with veterans, Huelskamp says the Obama administration is actively trying to eliminate it.
“When the administration came in and asked to end the Veterans Choice Program, that sent shock waves through Congress because most Democrats and Republicans agree we need to improve the system and give veterans more choice in their health care,” said Huelskamp.
“There’s a pushback from the administration but the secretary has agreed, maybe not the president but the secretary has agreed veterans deserve to keep their choice,” he said. “We’re trying to push the VA in a different direction than Obamacare is taking the rest of the healthcare system. I think at the end of the day, the better model is putting Americans in charge of their health care, not Washington, D.C.”
When will Congress get time answers and the VA operate more efficiently? Huelskamp says a big part of the problem is a massive government bureaucracy that takes a long time to straighten out
“There’s a culture of non-accountability, a culture of attacks on whistleblowers. That’s been going on for decades. It’s difficult to change that. That takes years,” said Huelskamp, who estimates some 330,000 bureaucrats are involved in VA operations.
“I think many of them do a terrific job but it’s a system that’s set up based on the 1950s and 60s, not 2015. So it is a cultural shift at the VA, but the president has to provide leadership. I fear in the next two years, he will continue to drift away from any commitments to veterans in terms of reforming the system,” said Huelskamp.
What about Secretary McDonald? Is he the right man to lead this change?
“We’ll see if the secretary can answer those questions we asked a couple of nights ago. Some of these questions have been outstanding for months, which will give us insight (into) whether they’re really making the changes that were promised,” said Huelskamp.
