6th District Congressman Bob Goodlatte (R-Roanoke County) and Florida Representative Jeff Miller, who chairs the House Veterans Affairs Committee, recently toured the Veterans Administration Center in Salem and then later met more vets at a roundtable discussion in Vinton.
Their verdict: local military veterans are relatively pleased with the medical attention they receive once they get into the V-A Center in Salem – but it’s still difficult at times to get through the phone system bottleneck and set an initial appointment.
Miller, who is leaving Congress at the end of the year, said from a “global perspective,” that the Veterans Administration is “making strides” towards reforms that reduce wait times to see medical professionals – wait times that allegedly may have contributed to the deaths of veterans elsewhere as widely reported. It takes time to change a culture and methods in a Department of Veterans Affairs with 350,000 employees noted Miller, just after he and Goodlatte also laid a wreath in memoriam at the Vinton-Roanoke County War Memorial.
“There are still some people at the V-A that need to be disciplined and in some cases removed from their jobs,” said Miller, adding that the “vast majority” of workers are doing their best. It’s about transparency and accountability said Miller, who saw signs that those in charge at the Salem V-A Center understand that it’s less about the bureaucracy and more about the veteran patients. “We saw veterans that were very pleased with the care they were receiving – very happy about the service.”
All the veteran’s hospitals have issues said Goodlatte, who has two in his district, but “overwhelmingly” he heard that local veterans were pleased with the level of service. “We need to work hard to provide oversight to make sure that improvements are made around the country.” That includes making sure Congress provides the resources needed to make those systemic changes, he noted.
At the roundtable in Vinton, Goodlatte and Miller again heard about a telephone system that is hard to penetrate in order to set an appointment. “The very first step to getting your health care is being able to reach someone,” said Goodlatte.
The consensus was that once an appointment is set, getting the medical attention needed does happen in a fairly short time span. Goodlatte also said he and Miller heard from veterans who would be amenable to seeking their health care needs from private physicians outside of the Veterans Administration system as an option, due to long waits, travel time to a V-A Center, etc.
“The V-A System should be competing with other health care systems and when they don’t have the best care available veterans should have the best choices,” said Goodlatte, “we want to be able to enhance their ability to do that.”
Miller added that the Choice program rolled out as an option for veterans to seek some health care elsewhere was interpreted by some in the V-A System as a threat to their jobs or an insult, but Miller said it was meant to “supplement what they are already doing. I think it took a while for people to understand that providing the choice to the veteran is the best [way] for us … to give them the ability to get care as quickly as they can, where they want it and when they want it. I believe that will [also] reduce long wait lines.”
By Gene Marrano
