By Darin Selnick
In recent hearings discussing the Department of Veterans Affairs budget for fiscal year 2016, VA Secretary Robert McDonald asked for the authority to repurpose the money that is allocated to the Veterans Choice Program. His main argument ā that the program has been underutilized.
This is likely true, but only because the program offers no true choice to veterans. The way the program is currently structured leaves veterans helplessly dependent on the VA to authorize their ability to exercise choice. It simply doesnāt work as intended ā and veterans suffer as a result.
Itās time to change that. The Veterans Independence Act, developed by Concerned Veterans for Americaās Fixing Veterans Health Care Taskforce, flips that concept on its head and puts veterans in charge of making their own health care choices.
When we were gathering the initial data to lay the groundwork for our taskforce, we saw something undeniable: The
VA bureaucracy decides which health care services veterans should have access to. From then on, we structured the Veterans Independence Act to put the veteran, not the bureaucrat, at the center of their health care decisions.
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