Richard Stone, the Department of Veterans Affairs executive in charge, poked a hole in Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s claim the agency is not fully funded.
Stone was asked Monday during a House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs hearing on the trend of veterans committing suicide and, specifically, addressing the recent number of veterans committing suicide on VA property.
“I think having sat through the last couple hours here with me, you understand, well understand very well my answer. This is not a financial problem,” said Stone. “This is a problem of the society that we live in. And this is about the interpersonal connections that we each have, to each other as a society.
“I can hire another 20,000 mental health providers and what I can say to you is that people in crisis will get great care. And they will come in or be seen in the same day as they are today,” Stone said. “I can hire additional people for at risk, but this is about moving to the left, moving towards the fact that we need to reduce risk. And it goes back to your colleagues’ comments earlier about whole health and identifying what connects us as humans, to other humans, and finding stabilization, as a society, that is much different than it was for those veterans that came home 30, 40, and 50 years ago.”
[Related: Veterans slam Ocasio-Cortez for her fierce defense of the VA]
During the hearing, the VA officials noted how of the more than 20 veterans who commit suicide every day, only a fraction of them are receiving care through the VA, with a majority never accessing the resources available to them.
The hearing took place hours after a veteran committed suicide at the Cleveland VA Medical Center, according to Fox 8.
After the hearing, Stone told the Washington Examiner the issue of veteran suicide is a multifaceted one that money alone cannot solve.
“Ten years ago we had a $4 billion budget for mental health, today I have an $8.9 billion budget for mental health,” he said. “I’ve doubled the number of mental health providers over these years, but yet we haven’t changed the suicide rate. What I’m saying this is not just about adding more personnel. Certainly we can always add more personnel and we can go move from one to two day wait time for mental health.”
When asked by another reporter what the VA needs from Congress right now, instead of saying money, Stone said the bureaucracy needs be clearer and faster on certain issues.
“No. 1, we need clarity on the never-activated guardsmen and reservists: Are they veterans or aren’t they veterans? Should they be allowed to come in?” he said. “Our option is, we’re here. We have an established system. These are people who had served in uniform. The fact they just weren’t activated shouldn’t keep them from coming in.”
Stone said it takes too long to build new intake centers, as approval can take four to seven years before construction begins: “We need to be much more agile in that.”
Stone’s comments are in stark contrast to New York Democrat Ocasio-Cortez’s insistence that the VA is not fully funded, at least when it comes to preventing veteran suicide.
Like many public systems, GOP want to rip the battery out + say the whole car doesn’t work, so they can sell it for parts.
Fully funding the VA & hiring to fill the *49k vacancies* is a clear path to improving it – not auctioning off our vet care systems to for-profit companies.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 25, 2019
The VA’s budget is more than $200 billion. The department has requested a total of $220.2 billion for fiscal 2020, a 9.6% increase from the previous fiscal year.
