Jeb Bush blasts Clinton for ‘insulting’ veterans

The former Florida governor touted his own plan to overhaul the VA, which includes expanding veterans’ access to private care if they choose to leave the VA system.

Clinton stirred controversy last week when she accused Republicans of exploiting concerns about the VA in order to advance a partisan plan to “privatize” the agency.

“I don’t understand why we have such a problem, because there have been a number of surveys of veterans and, overall, veterans who do get treated are satisfied with their treatment,” Clinton told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Friday.

“Now, nobody would believe that from the coverage that you see and the constant berating of the VA that comes from the Republicans,” she added.

While Clinton acknowledged the “scandal” that has struck the VA in recent years, she said it has “not been as widespread as it has been made out to be.”

“If there is a waiting period that is just unacceptable you should be able, in a sense, [to] get the opportunity to go out and have a private physician take care of you, but at the cost of the VA,” Clinton said, alluding to a “veteran’s choice” program that has been popular with Republicans.

The choice program allows veterans to obtain private sector health care using VA funds. However, agency officials successfully pushed Congress to allow them to raid funding for the program earlier this year to cover budget shortfalls created by troubled VA hospitals.

Clinton said the VA’s struggle “goes deeper” than the long waiting periods that have caused controversy over the past year.

“If you look at not only VA healthcare but at the backlog of disability determinations, there’s something not working within the bureaucracy, and I have said, I would like to literally appoint a SWAT team. I mean, bring in people and just tackle the disability, have an ongoing review of the care that is being given, do more to ensure that every VA hospital is delivering care to the highest standard of the community because unfortunately some are doing a lot better job than others are,” Clinton said.

The VA did indeed score well on the 2013 American Customer Satisfaction Index, which ranked aspects of VA care on a 0-100 scale. Inpatient care received a rating of 84, while customer service earned a 91.

Veterans groups criticized the survey, however, because it polled only veterans who did not get any kind of treatment outside VA facilities.

“This ignores an obvious reality that the Veterans Administration should be all too familiar with — veterans are not like non-veterans. What we think is great may be subpar to non-veterans,” a group called Disabled Veterans wrote in a blog post shortly after the survey’s release.

According to a survey commissioned by Concerned Veterans for America that was conducted earlier this month, a majority of all veterans believe it is “extremely important” to allow VA patients to have healthcare options outside of the government-run system.

“Despite yearly budgetary increases in the billions, and a workforce twice the size of the Marine Corps, the problems of long wait times, poor customer service and lack of accountability continue to pervade the VA,” John Cooper, spokesman for Concerned Veterans for America, told the Washington Examiner.

“Mrs. Clinton may want to minimize the problems at the VA, but veterans recognize the VA desperately needs reform,” Cooper added. “It is unfortunate that politicians like Mrs. Clinton refuse to put forth solutions that will give veterans the choice and accountability they deserve.”

Clinton called criticisms of the VA “a perfect example of the way that the Republicans try to have it both ways.”

“They try to create a downward spiral. Don’t fund it to the extent that it needs to be funded because we want it to fail so that we can argue for privatization,” she said. “They still want to privatize Medicare. They still want to do away with Social Security.”

The VA’s funding and staffing levels have risen steadily under President Obama, despite Clinton’s claim that Republicans had somehow withheld money from the agency.

In 2009, the VA’s budget was $93.7 billion. By 2012, that had grown to $132 billion.

Obama’s budget proposal for 2016 includes $168.8 billion in funding for the VA.

But it was Senate Democrats who blocked the VA spending bill earlier this month in order to put political pressure on Republicans to reach a better budget deal.

Second in size only to the Pentagon, the VA employs more than 340,000 people.

During her appearance before the House Select Committee on Benghazi last week, Clinton cited the sprawling size of the State Department as one reason why security problems like those that preceded the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi might not make it to the secretary of state’s desk. She said the State Department employs 70,000 people — roughly a fifth of the VA’s staff.

Even so, Clinton suggested during her interview with Maddow that the VA was understaffed.

“I think that the current new leadership that President Obama did put in seems to be trying to tackle a lot of this,” she said of the VA’s lingering problems. “I just don’t know if they have enough help.”

Sen. John McCain demanded Clinton apologize for her comments Monday in a statement highlighting the widespread nature of VA “corruption.”

“Hillary Clinton’s remarks downplaying the significance of the scandal in which veterans died awaiting care at VA hospitals in Phoenix and across our nation while corrupt bureaucrats collected bonuses are disgraceful, and show a total lack of appreciation for the crisis facing veterans’ healthcare today,” McCain said.

“Secretary Clinton owes an apology to the families of the veterans who lost their loved ones due to mismanagement and corruption in the federal government,” he added.

On the House side, Rep. Jeff Miller, chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee, blamed the VA’s continued failures on its bureaucrats Monday. The Florida Republican never mentioned Clinton by name, but decried “attempts to downplay” the VA scandal.

“Whether it’s continued delays in veterans’ medical care, the blatant waste of billions of taxpayer dollars or a rampant lack of accountability throughout every corner of the organization, there is simply no denying that the problems at the Department of Veterans Affairs are indeed widespread,” Miller said. “Anyone who would claim the opposite simply isn’t paying attention. The VA scandal was caused by dishonest bureaucrats who chose to whitewash the department’s problems rather than solve them.”

Sen. Marco Rubio was among the first Republican presidential candidates to question Clinton’s remarks, expressing his support for the veterans’ choice program she criticized during a town hall appearance with Concerned Veterans for America on Saturday.

“We have to answer a fundamental question: Why do these benefits exist? Do they exist to support a bureaucracy, or do they exist to support a veteran?” Rubio asked.

“Because if they exist to support a veteran, then the benefits should follow the veteran. And in many cases, if not most, the veteran is going to say, ‘I love the VA. I love the way they take care of me. I love that it’s a specialized facility where only veterans can go and they know our needs because some of the people taking care of us are veterans themselves, and I’m happy.’ And we’re never going to take that away,” Rubio said.

But he argued that in other cases, veterans may decide that wait times are too burdensome and opt for private care instead.

“So that’s why it’s important that there be choices involved in this,” he said.

The long list of unsolved problems at the VA has grown this year, from rationing drugs for sick veterans to creating a backlog that kept 34,000 combat veterans from ever receiving their benefits.

VA officials have continued to evade responsibility for doctoring patient waiting lists to cover up the long stretches of time veterans were forced to wait before receiving care.