“… As veterans, we served in Vietnam and in the post-Vietnam era military and understand all too well the problems that have beset the Department of Veterans Affairs in the past and the challenges now facing the VA as it cares for veterans from World War ll and Korea through Vietnam, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria…”
“Community Care’s “Choice” program was implemented hastily in 2014 as a Congressional response to a growing crisis in the VA of lengthy wait times for care first discovered at the Phoenix VA hospital. Since then, Choice has helped give many more veterans with the option of non-VA care in certain limited circumstances, but it’s also had many problems. Later this year, as a result of Congressional legislation passed in 2018, Community Care and specifically Choice will merge to become easier for veterans to understand and navigate. New regulations recently proposed will place veterans at the center of their health care decisions…”
“Some critics insinuate these moves to empower veterans and spur the VA to be more customer-focused may somehow lead to the dismantling of the VA and to outsourcing all medical care for veterans to the private sector. This presumption discounts and disregards what is happening inside the VA today because of efforts begun during our time in office and since then…” Read the full post here.
Source: Four former VA Secretaries: There’s an historic and welcome transformation underway at the VA – By Anthony Principi, Jim Nicholson, James Peake, Robert McDonald, February 5, 2019. Fox News.
