This past Memorial Day, Tennesseans honored the brave men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country and reflected on how their service helped ensure our continued security and freedom. Unfortunately, while our nation’s veterans have always looked out for us, our government has not consistently responded in kind.
Roughly one year ago, the disgraced former Secretary of Veterans Affairs, General Eric Shinseki, resigned amidst revelations that hospitals operated by the Veterans Administration (VA) were plagued with fraud and mismanagement, compromising the care of countless deserving veterans. When the Obama Administration replaced Shinseki with Robert McDonald as the new Secretary, the President promised that ‘the number one priority is making sure that problems get fixed."
Fast forward 365 days, and how has veterans’ care improved? The number of veterans facing long waits has not decreased significantly and the number of patients waiting more than 90 days for care has almost doubled.
How about the president’s promise to hold corrupt and incompetent employees accountable? While 110 VA facilities lied about veterans’ wait times, only one employee has been fired. The others have been transferred to different facilities, retired with benefits, or took paid leave – all still continuing to live off of your tax dollars.
If the VA is looking to identify an excuse for its poor service to veterans, insufficient funding won’t be one of them. Congress has fully funded the VA every year that I have served in Washington. The agency was exempted from the automatic spending cuts in the President’s sequester and has seen its budget increase year after year in an environment where other departments saw their accounts frozen or scaled back.
Most recently, the House voted with my support earlier this month to increase VA funding yet again by 5.6 percent over last year’s levels. With the tremendous resources and support Congress has given the VA, it is clear that this agency does not have a problem with its balance sheet – it has a problem with the overall culture of the agency, something that must be fixed from the inside out.
Unfortunately, this misconduct has spilled over into our home state of Tennessee. Last month, my office wrote a letter to VA Secretary Robert McDonald highlighting stunning reports of mismanagement and inefficiencies at the Alvin C. York Campus of the VA Tennessee Valley Healthcare System, located in Murfreesboro. According to multiple reliable sources, the Murfreesboro facility is no longer admitting new patients, instead referring them to Nashville.
Additionally, reports state that the facility’s emergency room is closed and now functions as an urgent care center which closes at 8 p.m. daily – a claim the VA has since admitted as fact. This all comes on top of multiple reports last year finding that the Murfreesboro VA clinic had some of the longest wait times in the nation.
In the wake of our request for an investigation of the Murfreesboro hospital, the VA finally announced modest steps to improve care at this facility, but many unanswered questions still remain. We will press forward with our calls for a full, independent report on the quality of care at this hospital so that we can ensure these mistakes are not repeated.
As the wife, mother, and daughter of veterans I know firsthand that these brave Americans give our country their very best, and they deserve the same in return. We need a plan from this President to fundamentally reform and reimagine the way that the VA delivers care to our nation’s heroes and, in the meantime, we need answers and accountability from our local VA here at home. After everything our veterans have done for us, isn’t this the least we can do for them?
