Senator listens to medical-care concerns

 Placing himself directly in the line of fire of the accumulated anger of Northwest Montana’s veterans, Sen. Jon Tester conducted another listening session at Flathead Valley Community College on Sunday afternoon.

More than 100 veterans and family members came out to tell their stories and grill Tester about the health care (or lack thereof) they had received from the Veterans Health Administration.

As one of the senators on the United States Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, Tester is better versed than most congresspersons in the problems with the VA.

“You’ve been on this committee since 2007,” said one veteran. “Have you failed these people? They would get better care in Guantanamo.”

While this was the most inflammatory comment of the afternoon, Tester took the blame upon himself.

“I take full responsibility for what’s wrong with the VA,” he said. “But does me doing that make your health-care better? No it does not.”

He wanted everyone in attendance to know the Senate had passed a bill, 93-3 that was meant to create some changes as soon as possible with veterans health-care. 

The bill, which would double Veterans Affairs spending in the next three years, seeks to hires thousands of professionals and hold accountable those who allowed veterans to languish without proper care. The measure would cost $35 billion over the next three years if approved by the House of Representatives and President Obama.

Of particular interest to Montanans is a point in the bill that would allow veterans living more than 40 miles from a VA facility to go to a local, non-VA hospital on the Veterans Affairs Department’s dime. Montana’s largest veterans hospital, Fort William Henry Harrison, is more than 190 miles from Kalispell.

Tester said he knew the challenges in trying to get adequate health care in a rural state like Montana.

“We need to get [Montana veterans] access to health care,” he said. “Some of the biggest problems we’re seeing are issues with staffing — both competent and numbers of staff — and prescription drugs.”

In his tenure in the Senate, Tester has also changed the federal mileage rate for disabled veterans who must travel for health-care from 11 cents a mile to 46 cents.

Even so, many of the veterans at Flathead Valley Community College had spent years getting claims adjudicated and bounced around from department to department.

Madeline Steeley, an Air Force veteran with several other vets in her family, spoke clearly about what she saw as systemic incompetence with Veterans Affairs.

“We need competent doctors with clinical experience,” she said. “Montana’s VA is — at best — rural medicine. If Congress can have Bethesda, we should get the best our country has to offer.”

According to Tester, the average wait time for new patients at Fort Harrison is 48 days. This period is below the national average, but still far too high, he said. 

“We passed that Veterans Affairs bill to try and fix the underlying problems,” Tester said. “We need more doctors, more nurses and more use of telemedicine.” 

Tip Clark, a retired U.S. Air Force Brigadier General, contracted leukemia he believes stems from his flight time in Vietnam. Even so, he commended the good people of the VA who make attempts to help veterans in spite of poor resource allocation and administrative oversight. 

Tester previously held a listening session in Missoula. Montana consistently ranks in the top five  states in veterans per capita.

“I get my best ideas from you when it comes to veterans issues,” Tester said to the crowd. “Veterans are very direct, and I appreciate that.”