Santa Clara County veterans voice concerns at San Jose meeting

Mike Hennigan stood up in front of 50 of his peers at Thursday night’s veterans town hall meeting and told a story of a friend who had a nose problem that had turned into a tumor covering roughly one-third of the man’s face.

But care for the tumor was slow, Hennigan said, because of a change in scheduling doctor appointments that veterans were never told.

Hennigan was not the only person in the audience who decried the lack of communication, particularly when it came to health care, between the department’s administration and veterans.

Kenneth Webb said his primary physician through the VA, after several months of testing, told him he had terminal cancer and that he needed to “get used to it.” The doctor provided no other support or help for Webb, who refused to accept his diagnosis and instead bought separate insurance and inquired about what could be done at Stanford Hospital.

Stanford doctors performed lung surgery and, against all odds, Webb said, he goes back in February to see instead if all the cancer has been removed from his organ.

“I’m thankful to still be up and about,” he said. “But when it takes so long that things are progressing faster than we can get care for them, it’s so out of hand.”

Webb learned at the meeting, for example, that he never had to buy insurance out of pocket. Instead, his fellow veterans informed him, there was an option he could have pursued with the department where administrators could have helped pay for that insurance.

Webb said he was never once told about that choice.

In addition to the men and women in the audience who had served in combat ranging from World War II to the most recent war in Iraq, Julianna Boor, director of the Oakland regional office for the Department of Veterans Affairs, and Lisa Freeman, director of the VA Palo Alto Health Care System, listened as Hennigan and others voiced their concerns about the administration, particularly a lack of communication between veterans and department officials.

Freeman said the administration, in order to do its job right, had to better communicate changes or notifications to the roughly 85,000 veterans in Santa Clara County.

“We have to do a better job,” she said. “We need to do a better job.”

“If I didn’t have these guys with me, I never would have known this was going on,” said Vietnam veteran Phil Andrede. “If you’re not getting information out to us, we’re not going to know. We won’t know where to go.”