Roughly a dozen veterans protested outside the Department of Veterans Affairs calling for better care, a day before Veterans Day.
The Concerned Veterans for America group gave out signs, shirts, and snacks to those who joined the protest in Lafayette Square, where they marched between the department and the White House on Wednesday.
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The group was aiming to highlight what it described as a department that is more focused on bureaucracy than on helping the veterans who depend on its care.
“What we see is that the bureaucracy seems to be more important than the veteran and that if the bureaucracy is experiencing a drop-off or letdown and folks using them directly, I think their impetus first and foremost is to make sure that the veteran is coming to their facilities,” Russ Duerstine, the deputy director of Concerned Veterans for America, told the Washington Examiner.
The group wants better enforcement of the Mission Act, legislation that was passed in 2018 that ensures veterans have quality medical care after leaving the military at the VA or at another healthcare facility, which the department will pay for if it falls under any of six specific reasons.
Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough acknowledged that the department had to delay or defer more than 19 million appointments, according to Military.com, a statistic Duerstine referenced during his speech at the rally.
Roseanne Rodriguez, an Iraq war veteran and the strategic director for Concerned Veterans for America, spoke about her own medical experiences, with and without the VA. During her 15 months in Iraq, where she served as a medic, she had to “cart some of my friends who were injured off of the battlefield,” she said.
Rodriguez has the benefit of private insurance and explained that all three of her doctors are within 15 minutes of her Virginia home, but if she had to rely solely on the VA for medical care, she’d have to either travel to Washington, D.C., or an hour to Frederick, Maryland, to get it.
“That should be an option for every veteran, right? The freedom to choose where they receive their care,” Rodriguez added. “So I’m here today rallying for them because those warriors who served beside me, they should have the same access to care that I have.”
VA administrators have been overruling doctors’ judgments and have been preventing them from sending their patients to outside facilities, according to an investigation from inewsource, in partnership with USA Today, released earlier this month, and they came to their conclusions after reviewing “thousands of pages of department manuals and medical records, along with interviews with dozens of patients, advocates, and providers.”
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They also found that these issues have intensified over the last two years, in which they have tried to both retain patients and save money.
“I am increasingly alarmed by the concerns I hear from veterans and from stories like this one,” Rep. Mike Bost, the ranking member of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said regarding the investigation, according to CBS8. “They all point to one thing: VA not following the law and holding veterans hostage to a healthcare system that is not serving them.”
