U.S. Rep. Martha Roby (R-AL) is looking at ways for the Department of Veterans Affairs to better address health care services for veterans, especially those in her home district in central Alabama.
Roby envisions a mechanism whereby the VA could directly intervene to improve substandard health care services.
In the past, Roby has worked to revamp how distance from VA Health Centers is calculated for the Veterans Choice program (from “as the crow flies” to actual road miles) and is working on further improving that program so veterans can see non-VA doctors if the nearby VA facility doesn’t provide the services they need. Roby is also working with Rep. Jeff Miller of Florida on his plan to investigate allegations of retaliation against VA whistleblowers.
But treating these symptoms won’t solve the greater problems present in central Alabama, which the Associated Press said has the worst wait times for veterans seeking health services.
“If you have a few particularly troublesome systems, like central Alabama, where obviously efforts to reform over the years have just not worked, let’s not keep doing the same thing,” Todd Stacey, Roby’s communications director, said. “Let’s try a different approach.”
The foundation of that approach is that funding alone won’t save the VA health care system. “That’s why today, I began laying the groundwork for a major legislative effort to compel the VA secretary to intervene at facilities like Central Alabama, which are among the worst in the nation,” Roby said recently after passage of a bill funding, among other things, mental health care for veterans.
Rather than try to reform such a damaged system, Roby has a more innovative solution: Bring in the federal VA to support failing local offices.
Roby offers an analogy. “If a school is failing, the state comes in and takes over that system. And everybody there is aware of (those consequences) — the principal, the teachers, the parents. We want the same thing now in the VA. Where a (local) VA system is consistently failing, we want the VA to come in – the Washington VA – and take over,” Roby said.
But Roby’s staff said there isn’t a rapid-response authority at the VA’s disposal. Roby’s office is researching legislative options to make such an intervention mechanism possible for the VA.
A major part of Roby’s insistence on getting the federal VA involved is an issue of the culture in central Alabama’s VA. “That culture has festered in central Alabama for years,” Roby said.
After finding out that a previous director of the Central Alabama Veterans Health Care System had misled her about firing those responsible for manipulating the wait times reported for veterans care, Roby became the person to call for Alabama VA whistleblowers. Richard Tremaine and Sheila Meuse went public with the retaliation the VA launched at them for speaking publicly about the office’s problems.
“They told me the truth about the cover-ups that were happening at the VA, and for that, they should be rewarded, not punished or marginalized,” Roby said.
“You should know that I’m not done working to clean up the VA. There is much more to come, so stay tuned,” Roby said in a recent column.