Hundreds of thousands of veterans in the city and Long Island desperately need better healthcare, according to a New York senator who is calling on Congress to pass legislation that U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said would improve former military men and women’s access to medical treatment and address serious problems facing the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday passed the legislation that would improve accountability and allow the prompt firing of inadequate senior VA officials, expedite the hiring of more doctors and nurses at VA hospitals and clinics to address shortages, and cut back wait times for care. The Senate too is expected to greenlight the bill this week.
The legislation comes on the heels of a Veterans Affairs Department audit reporting that more than 57,000 new applicants for care have had to wait at least three months for their first medical appointment – and another 64,000 newly enrolled veterans who asked for healthcare appointments never received them.
The VA, which services about 9 million veterans across the country, has been facing significant fire over evidence that workers fabricated numbers for patient wait times for appointments, and the growing controversy over the matter prompted Eric Shinseki to resign as head of the VA on May 30.
Additionally, the VA has begun removing top officials at its facility in Phoenix, which has been a focal point of the agency’s problems, with investigators uncovering that long waits had been covered up at the facility.
“It’s clear we can still do more to address the serious problems facing New York’s heroes,” Schumer said in a prepared statement.
The New York senator stressed that the state’s hospitals serve a huge number of individuals, leaving “significant room for error and improvement.” According to the VA, there are about 125,000 enrollees in VeteransHealth Care in the five boroughs, and there are approximately 345,000 enrollees in the entire VA’s New York-New Jersey network.
By Anna Gustafson
