One easy target in the political controversy over long wait times and substandard care for veterans is certainly the VA leadership, which even the White House says has allowed a "corrosive" culture to develop inside that agency. But it is difficult to review these VA troubles without wondering why the Congress has escaped questions about its own oversight, and whether lawmakers can actually bring about real change and reform for vets in the future.
That need for reform is clearly on the table as the Congress returns from July Fourth break; not only will lawmakers continue a series of oversight hearings on the VA, but key leaders must also try to forge a House-Senate compromise on VA reform legislation.
What's clear is that investigators have weighed in with the Congress on troubles inside the VA's health service many times before the last few months - and not much has changed. Some examples:
+ "In March 2001, VA reported that 948 of its clinics had waiting times of 120 days or more," the Government Accountability Office reminded lawmakers at a late night House hearing in June.
+ Testimony from the GAO to Congress in 1999 told of how "veterans have to wait 150 days to obtain a follow-up appointment with a primary care provider and that the waiting time for specialty care appointments exceeds 30 days on average."
+ A GAO report in 2001 also gave the Congress an early hint that data on waiting times was being fudged by VA schedulers, describing how if no appointments were available for two months, patients would be asked to call back.
"As a result, data collected from these clinics would always show average waiting times of 2 months or less," which is basically what some schedulers have been doing in recent years to make the wait times look shorter for veterans seeking an appointment.
The same 2001 report also raised questions about the validity of data that had been placed in the VA's computer schedule system.
"For five clinics, clerks reported waiting times ranging from 17 to 56 days shorter than the computer-extracted data," the GAO reported 13 years ago.
You can also rewind even further:
+ There was a 1993 GAO report to Congress, that said "veterans frequently waited 8 to 9 weeks to obtain appointments."
+ And here was a 2003 review from Democrats that talked about thousands of veterans in Georgia being on waiting lists for appointments.
+ That assessment was repeated for other states as well - here is one from 2002 about the VA system in Oklahoma that said "long waiting times are a serious problem for veterans."
In other words, the VA (under at least three different Presidents) knew about these issues, and so did the Congress (under the control of both parties during that time).
And yet the problems weren't fixed, as you can see in the latest data on VA apppointment delays issued late last week, as many facilities are still taking a significant amount of time to get first appointments for veterans.
Walking the walk on oversight in Congress
It's easy for lawmakers to hold a few hearings that get a lot of news media attention on VA troubles - it's much more difficult to actually translate that testimony into legislation, and then use that to change how a federal agency does its business, while keeping a tight rein on the Executive Branch.
The current Chairman of the House Veterans Committee, Rep. Jeff Miller (R-FL) was after the VA even before the issue of long wait times splashed into the headelines, as he has vowed to hold two hearings a week on a host of internal VA issues.
"We will be talking about manipulated wait times, bloated middle bureaucracies," Miller said as he wrapped up his second post-dinner hearing of the last few weeks, a rarity on Capitol Hill - there will be another one of those prime time hearings on Tuesday night.
Really, the critical question is not whose fault this is, but rather, who can step up and fix it.
In late June, lawmakers held their first meeting of House-Senate negotiators on a VA reform bill - but it didn't really seem like anything was that close in terms of a deal - just a lot of talk about how "change" was needed inside the VA.
But "change" means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
If Congress wants to get something done on VA reform before September, then that will have to be hammered out in the next four weeks, before the House and Senate take an extended summer break that will last until after Labor Day.
But will it happen? Miller told me on Sunday he still hopes they can get a reform bill done before the August break in Congress.
Stay tuned.
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