Our country’s veterans have risked life and limb to protect our freedoms and ensure our way of life. For too long, the Department of Veterans Affairs has failed our nation’s veterans by operating under a culture of corruption and neglect that lacked accountability or leadership.
Veterans deserve better. With sweeping reforms put in place by the Veterans’ Access to Care through Choice, Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014, I am committed to seeing that we have a better VA health system.
There’s no greater calling for Congress or for the next secretary of the VA than to bring value back to the VA. I have made it my mission to get to the bottom of the VA’s problems, first uncovering signs of neglect and mismanagement at the Atlanta VA Medical Center after holding a Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee field hearing there last summer. I look forward to continuing to be a part of the effort to fix the VA’s problems and put in place reforms to instill a system of success and accountability.
My colleagues and I have worked on a compromise that is an overdue step toward helping improve the quality and timeliness of care by giving veterans a choice. In this reform legislation, the VA is required to give veterans the opportunity to go to a private provider if they cannot secure an appointment at the VA within a reasonable amount of time, or if they live more than 40 miles from the nearest VA facility.
Another critical element included in the Veterans’ Access to Care Act is the expansion of the VA’s internal capacity to provide timely care to veterans, including $6.4 million for a new, larger, VA outpatient center in Cobb County to alleviate pressure on metro Atlanta’s VA health care facilities and help handle veterans’ needs.
While we have put in place critical reforms to address the quality and access problems, until we root out this culture of corruption and misconduct within the VA, more must be done to ensure we put our veterans first. That’s why in the reform legislation, we included a provision to allow for the firing of incompetent or corrupt senior managers to provide accountability that has been sorely lacking. This authority gives the new VA secretary, Robert McDonald, the tools needed to enforce the VA and make it a responsive organization.
In Congress, we are responsible for providing critical oversight and seeing that the culture of the VA changes so that we have accountability from top to bottom in the senior leadership and management of the Department of Veterans Affairs. We owe veterans nothing less than everything to ensure the well-being of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines as we send them to war and, most importantly, when they return home from the battlefield. That’s a passion of mine, and as a member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, I am committed to keeping this promise.
Johnny Isakson is a Republican senator from Georgia.
