EDITOR: Federal lawmakers need to to restore $1.8 billion to the
veterans health care budget, make VA health care funding mandatory
and enable VA to accept Medicare payments of veterans.
EDITOR:
Federal lawmakers need to to restore $1.8 billion to the veterans health care budget, make VA health care funding mandatory and enable VA to accept Medicare payments of veterans. If Congress can meet the president’s request for an additional $87 billion to fund the ongoing war in Iraq, then Congress also can raise an additional $1.8 billion next year, and a $3 billion increase the following year, to meet the health care needs of veterans from the war on terror and earlier periods of service.
A grateful nation does not commit its own to battle, then retreat from its moral obligation to them. The founders of The American Legion made it their civic duty to remind America of that fact. That’s the reason they successfully fought, after World War I, for the creation of a federal agency to address the unique needs of veterans.
We want the Congress and the president of the United States to continue to ‘provide for the common defence,’ as the Constitution requires. And we want them to provide the just benefits that a grateful nation owes those who return from Iraq as well as others who served honorably in the U.S. armed forces.
They earned it. There are good people in Congress, in both major political parties, who know we speak the truth. If the ever-present courage of our men and women in the armed forces exists also in Congress and in the White House, then our nation will do the right thing for America’s veterans.
Also, The American Legion continues to fight, alongside other veterans service organizations, to close a $1.8 billion funding gap in the proposed Department of Veterans Affairs FY-2004 health care budget. A blueprint passed by the House in April called for $27.1 billion for the system, but in July the House approved an appropriations bill that called for $25.3 billion.
The Senate Appropriations Committee did not exactly come to the rescue. The panel voted to make up $1.5 billion of the shortfall, but gave the White House control over most of the money, instead of sending it to veterans’ health care.
There are telltale signs that the health care system that serves America’s veterans needs more money. The American Legion’s “I Am Not A Number” survey in May identified scores of the more than 200,000 veterans who must wait from six months to two years for their initial primary-care appointments at VA facilities.
Additionally, about 164,000 veterans in the lowest of VA’s eight priority-treatment groups have been suspended from enrolling in the VA health care system because it lacks the resources to serve additional veterans. Recent news media accounts of service members from the war on terror failing to access the system in a timely manner were glaring indicators that VA health care, albeit of sound quality by a myriad of standards, is hard to access because of chronic under-funding. T
The American Legion is fighting to switch the VA health care budget from discretionary funding, which Congress must approve each fiscal year, to mandatory funding, just like Social Security and Medicare, whereby federal dollars are allocated by a formula to meet the system’s demands. The nation’s largest veterans organization also wants to end the restriction that keeps veterans from using their Medicare benefits to pay for treatment at VA.
Yet another staple of the Legion’s “GI Bill of Health” entails allowing funds derived from veterans who pay for their own VA health care, either by a third-party or by a premium-based plan, to supplement rather than to remain subtracted from federal funding.
John A. Brieden III
American Legion National Commander,
Washington, D.C.
