Honoring Our Veterans Means Reaching Out to Them

On this Memorial Day, it’s worth taking a look at the VA system of health care, one that I usually referred to as the best health care system in the country.  That’s not to say that it’s perfect.  Any system has its flaws, and the VA has particularly suffered from having its year-to-year funding tied up in a game of budgetary football for so long.  But it says something to me that probably the most commonly cited problem is that not enough veterans are using it.

When I refer to the high quality of care, I don’t just mean the cost-efficiency by which the VA consistently pays less than Medicare for prescription drugs and currently possesses many of the administrative efficiencies that we’re trying to get into Medicare – items like Health IT and coordinated care.  I mean health outcomes – including the VA having better health indicators than Medicare for the same population of patients for 12 of 13 criteria cited by the New England Journal of Medicine.  And I mean patient satisfaction, which consistently kicks the butt of the private insurance industry.

The medical care for those in the system is great.  The outreach to those outside the system, however, is poor.  Listen to the story from Rey Leal, an advocate for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

It seems like outreach, particularly for the increasing number of recently discharged veterans, should be something easy to do.  The need is obvious, particularly for those suffering from PTSD and other mental health problems as a direct result of their service.  The worthiness is obvious, as one of the few areas of agreement across the political spectrum is that we have a sacred obligation to care for those who have put themselves in harm’s way to defend our freedom and keep us safe.  So how can it be that, as Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand wrote on Daily Kos, 76% of veterans in New York City are not receiving benefits through the VA?

The short version is that the VA finds out its final budget number usually in September, when it must be passed with the rest of the federal budget in order for the government to keep functioning.  And even then, the VA only finds out their number for the next year, limiting their ability to plan ahead.  Since their primary focus is delivering care to the veterans they already have in the system, outreach efforts to tell new veterans of their eligibility is often low on the priority when they don’t know if the overall budget is about to be cut or not.

The easy way to fix this is to lock in a multi-year budget for the VA.  The Obama budget offered up $25 billion in additional funding over the next five years, which is a great start.  We need to lock in that number now through legislation.  Knowing that it will be there will allow the VA to create a pro-active outreach program, particularly for the thousands of men and women leaving active duty with no sense of what they’re entitled to and no one to guide them through the process.  A more pro-active VA is the least we owe those who have given us so much.