Thursday, March 08, 2007

Harry needs to learn the D.C. way

because it's obvious that he doesn't have the proper attitude yet. I mean, he chaired an entire three-hour hearing without pontificating.

That's just *not* the way things are done in Washington. :)

{mostly crossposted from Progressive Waves AZ-05}

Today, Congressman Harry Mitchell chaired a meeting of the House Veterans Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.

The subject on the agenda was "Servicemembers Seamless Transistion into Civilian Life - The Heroes Return" and the witness list included a number of VA administrators, workers, and veterans and/or family members of veterans.

The complete witness list can be found here.

Audio Coverage can be found at the link. [Note - The hearing was over 3 hours long. If you listen to it, plan accordingly.]

[Note: I didn't listen to the whole thing; I tried to focus on Harry.]

Harry was pretty low-key and professional during the hearing, in that he didn't use the occasion to start speechifying (is that even a word? LOL); he just asked direct questions, particularly about patient complaints.

To those questions, the responses of Michael Kussman, Acting Under Secretary for Health, Department of Veterans Affairs, mostly ranged from "that's handled at the local level" (regarding specific complaints) to "I'll get back to you" (regarding the number of patient complaints per month.)

BTW - Harry's best quote of the hearing: "I think that it is our duty as a nation to do everything that we can to give them the finest care that we can."

The most entertaining part of the entire hearing occurred relatively early in the hearing - Rep. Steve Buyer (R-IN), the ranking member of the Veterans Affairs Committee, but not specifically assigned to Oversight and Investigations, complained that the makeup of the panel was disrespectful to Secretary Kussman.

Apparently, the House has a rule stating that a political appointee shouldn't have to be part of a panel with an enlisted member of the armed forces or a former VA employee (Both PFC Kimberly Lain and Paul Sullivan, formerly a project director for the VA, were also supposed to be part of the first panel). Congressman Buyer cited "Rule 11" but I couldn't find anything applicable online, so I don't know the text of the rule.

After a brief consultation and recess, PFC Lain and Mr. Sullivan were asked to sit on the 2nd panel.

Congressman Buyer (R-Snot) should be proud of himself - he did yeoman's work protecting bureaucratic propriety.

Anyway, a prime focus of the first panel was the lack of communication between the DOD and VA, especially in the area of transitioning veterans. It seems that the VA's computer systems aren't capable of downloading medical records from the DOD.

During the 2nd panel, PFC Lain, who was injured in basic training in the summer of 2005, spoke about her and other soldiers' frustration at dealing with the bureaucracy or not even being told exactly what they need to do to move their evaluation process along. She cited as one example the fact that while injured servicemembers need hard copies of their medical records for the evaluation boards, they don't actually get those hard copies unless they specifically ask their doctor for them. Frequently, by the time they were aware of that need, their doctor no longer had access to the needed records.

She noted that while her care at Walter Reed was great, her treatment after she was discharged from the hospital was almost the polar opposite.

Her frustration continued until she ran into a DAV (Disabled American Veterans) counselor who assisted her in navigating the labyrinth of VA bureaucracy.

She is now due for a medical retirement in short order.

Many of her complaints were echoed by the 3rd panel's Kathy Pearce of Mesa, Arizona, mother of Sgt. Brent Bretz. In 2005, Sgt. Bretz was severely wounded in Iraq by an IED.

Like PFC Lain, she complimented the Army doctors involved with the case; Sgt. Bretz' care in the immediate aftermath of his injuries was "world-class". But like PFC Lain, her opinion of the DOD's and VA's aftercare efforts is significantly lower.

At the beginning of her testimony, she noted that her son is in a better position than most other injured returning veterans - she was and is in a position to help him. But that advantage only goes so far.

Like PFC Lain before her, of all of the issues Ms. Pearce talked about, perhaps her biggest complaint is with the "interminable" bureaucracy. She recited a laundry list of problems, including outpatient care that didn't meet the "unique needs" of her son, "red tape" both at DOD and VA, and "overloaded caseworkers."

In response to a question from Congressman Tim Walz (D-MN) (and others), she advocated both for a status between "inpatient" and "outpatient" and for "transitional housing" on both the VA side and the DOD side of the process. A lot of the difficulty for her son and for the others is in the transition from "24/7" care to none at all.

Congresswoman Ginny Brown-Waite (R-FL) was concerned with if she (Ms. Pearce) "brought this to the attention of [her] member of Congress?" [Actually, this makes Rep. Brown-Waite sound worse than she really was. In fact, she wasn't too bad (not as bad as Buyer, anyway) but by leading off with a question like that one, she appeared to be trying to put some blame on to the victims of the DOD's and VA's shoddy care, instead of the perpetrators of it. The rest of her questions were better.]

Ms. Pearce answered that she had contacted her Senators, but not her Congressman.Overall, as is usual with these sorts of hearings, the juicy stuff wasn't in the prepared statements, it was in the Q & A part of the program. At one point, Rep. Bob Filner (D-CA), the chair of the Veterans Affairs Committee, started barking at one of the panelists. (I didn't catch which one, though.)

If you have the opportunity to listen to the hearing, it should worth your while. Just skip the prepared statements. :)

MSM coverage of the hearing here (SF Chronicle) and here (Knoxville News Sentinel).

...In a related story about the Defense Department's latest brilliant recruiting tactic, the New York Times has a story about how returning National Guard and Reserve members receive far less help with their disability claims than do active-duty members.
Veterans face serious inequities in compensation for disabilities depending on where they live and whether they were on active duty or were members of the National Guard or the Reserve, an analysis by The New York Times has found.

Those factors determine whether some soldiers wait nearly twice as long to get benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs as others, and collect less money, according to agency figures.

These stories have been floating around since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan; maybe with the current furor over the general quality of care provided by the VA, somebody will pay attention to them.

Later!

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