VA Says It Needs $17.6 Billion to Hire Medical Staff, Add Facilities
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
The VA is requesting funds from Congress to make infrastructure improvements to ailing system.
The Department of Veteran Affairs is requesting $10 billion in new funding from Congress in order to hire 10,000 additional clinical staff over the next two years and to pay for veterans' care performed by private providers. It is asking for an additional $7.6 billion to construct eight new VA facilities around the country and to lease 77 additional facilities, among other infrastructure improvements.
Only 1,500 of the new hires would be doctors, the rest would be supporting staff such as nurses and physician assistants, acting VA secretary Sloan Gibson testified Wednesday at a Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs hearing, according to Modern.
“I believe that the greatest risk to veterans over the intermediate to long-term is that additional resources are provided only to support increased purchase care in the community and not to materially remedy the historic shortfall in internal VA capacity,” Gibson said. “Such an outcome would leave VA even more poorly positioned to meet future demand.”
Gibson outlined serious problems regarding access to healthcare and key actions the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has taken to get Veterans off wait lists and into clinics, explaining, “The trust that is the foundation of all we do – the trust of the Veterans we serve and the trust of the American people and their elected representatives –has eroded,” and “We have to earn that trust back through deliberate and decisive action, and by creating an open and transparent approach for dealing with our stakeholders to better serve Veterans.”
Lawmakers said they found themselves conflicted on the funding request. They want to help veterans get the care they need, but they find themselves struggling to trust data and individuals at the agency, committee members said.
Sen. Mike Johanns (R-NE), according to, The Washington Post , pressed Gibson about whether the additional funding would truly address the wait-time issue, and Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), wondered whether Gibson had tackled the problems aggressively enough. “I don’t think you need more billions and billions of dollars,” Johanns said.
During the hearing, Burr referenced a July 15 press release in which the agency recapped numbers that claimed it had reduced its veterans' care claims backlog by more than 55 percent from its peak of 611,000 in March 2013. The figures were originally introduced in a House Committee on Veterans' Affairs hearing, despite the fact that a representative from the Office of Inspector General said that the OIG doubted the accuracy of the figure.
“You've got to gain the trust of this committee and the country,” Burr said. “How smart is it to release a press release with numbers refuted by those investigating the VA?”
Another change Gibson said the agency is making to improve care and efficiency as it completes reviews, fact-finding, and other investigations, is beginning to initiate personnel actions to hold those accountable who committed wrongdoing or were negligent in discharging their management responsibilities.
The inappropriate 14-day access measure also has been removed from all individual employee performance plans to eliminate any motive for inappropriate scheduling practices. In the course of completing this task, over 13,000 performance plans were amended. And Gibson has directed a comprehensive external audit of scheduling practices across the entire VHA system.
When asked what would happen if the agency didn't get the additional funds, Sloan responded, “The wait times just get longer.”