Montana VA seeking to manage care for vets

This week Congress voted to extend a troubled program to create time to fix the system connecting veterans to health care. Montana Veterans Affairs officials said they hope that fix means more control returned to local hands.

After news broke in 2014 that veterans were waiting months to get care at VA facilities, Congress rushed a $10 billion federal program into existence called Veterans Choice. The program aimed to help connect vets to private health-care providers if they face a long wait for VA appointments or live far from a VA clinic.

“But Choice has not been great,” said Mike Garcia, public affairs officer for the Montana VA agency. “It’s not been working for our veterans and it’s really damaged longtime relationships that we had with some community partners, community providers and hospitals.”

Since Veterans Choice unrolled, many veterans have said their wait time has grown and the program is inconsistent. On the other end, providers have faced delays for reimbursement of care.

This week Congress sent President Donald Trump legislation to allow the VA to operate the program until the money plugged into Veterans Choice runs out.

“Not because it’s been a glowing success, but because there’s about $1 billion left in the original funding for the program,” Garcia said.

Without the legislation, Veterans Choice is set to expire Aug. 7.

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont, said the U.S. House of Representatives’ passage of the bill is the first step in reforming the program to make it work better for veterans in Montana. Tester is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee.

“In a rural state like ours it’s important that veterans can access a doctor closer to home, but we need to make sure the process isn’t bogged down with bureaucracy,” he said.

In 2014, Congress gave Veterans Choice 90 days to get off the ground.

In that time, Montana veterans were swept under the care of Health Net, a company based in California that received the contract to administer the program for a large part of the country.

Garcia said he believes some of what Health Net administers through the Choice program should be returned to the VA’s list of responsibilities.

“What we expect is that Choice will either be changed or replaced to allow us to directly manage the care of our veterans — both for scheduling as well as for picking providers,” he said. “We don’t care what it looks like, as long as it allows us to do that.”

Garcia said the VA also will push to simplify its current system as Congress works to restructure how veterans are connected to care.

He said that during VA Undersecretary Dr. Baligh Yehia’s recent visit to Montana, Yehia said the fact the VA buys care in the community eight different ways is part of the problem.

“That’s eight pots of money, eight authorizations to spend that money and limitations on how it’s spent … Choice was just one of those eight,” Garcia said.

Reporter Katheryn Houghton may be reached at 758-4436 or by email at khoughton@dailyinterlake.com.