releases: https://www.mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/floor-statements?ContentRecord_id=8b0e3239-622b-46f1-9f08-795a346cec97
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| https://www.mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/floor-statements?ContentRecord_id=8b0e3239-622b-46f1-9f08-795a346cec97 | OPENING STATEMENT BY SENATOR JOHN McCAIN AT FIELD HEARING IN GILBERT, ARIZONA ON VA CHOICE CARD, MANAGEMENT & ACCOUNTABILITY AT PHOENIX VA | 2015-12-14 | 2015 | 2015-12 | Republican | House | AZ | John McCain | M000303 | www.mccain.senate.gov | legacy | Washington, D.C. U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) delivered the following opening statement at a Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs field hearing in Gilbert, Arizona titled, Keeping the Promise for Arizona Veterans: The VA Choice Card, Management and Accountability at the Phoenix VA Medical Center: Thank you. I greatly appreciate Senator Sullivan from the great state of Alaska being here to chair this field hearing of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee today. Senator Sullivan is a proud Marine and, despite his short tenure in the Senate, has worked tirelessly over the past year to improve our nations security and to fight for those who have served in uniform. Veterans of this country are fortunate to have Senator Sullivan advocating on their behalf. I also want to thank the Chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee, Senator Johnny Isakson from Georgia, who is unable to be with us today. He and the Veterans Affairs committee have made enormous progress in reforming and overseeing the Department of Veterans Affairs. This is actually the third field hearing that the committee has undertaken to examine how veterans are using and, in some cases, how the VA is not helping them use, the VA Choice Card to get the health care they need. I also am very grateful to the City of Gilbert for hosting us in this facility. Being here is very helpful to our having a full discussion the challenges and obstacles to true reform that still remain at the VA. I would like to take this time to recognize and thank them for their support of veterans through their various programs such as Operation Welcome Home and support of homeless veterans through the Homeless Veterans East Valley Partnership. Also, I want to congratulate Gilbert was also recognized this year as being in the Top 5 Best Cities in the United States for Veterans. I will never forget the town hall forum I hosted in Phoenix where I heard directly from the families of four veterans who passed away in recent months. They came and stood before a crowded room to tell their stories. With tears in their eyes, they described how their loved ones suffered because they were not provided the care they needed and deserved. They recalled countless unanswered phone calls and ignored messages, endless wait times and delays, mountains of bureaucratic red tape, while their loved ones, those who selflessly served their country, experienced, painful, debilitating, and ultimately fatal conditions. No one should be treated this way in a country as great as ours. But to ignore the pleas for help and care from those who have sacrificed on behalf of the United States is unconscionable. And we should all be ashamed. The scandal at Phoenix then led to revelations of similar problems at other VA medical centers around the country where bureaucrats were gaming the system to get better bonuses by denying care to our veterans. This tragedy created a crisis of confidence toward the VA, the federal agency that was established to care for them. Congress responded quickly and in a bipartisan manner to this crisis. In a matter of weeks, the House and the Senate passed the Veterans Access, Choice, and Accountability Act. This bill provided an unprecedented $15 billion in immediate, emergency appropriations that was added on the Veteran Health Administrations regular annual budget of about $60 billion to hire more doctors and nurses and to issue the VA Choice Card for those veterans who could not get into a VA for their health care. The bill also gave the VA direct hiring authority so that all of the cumbersome rules and regulations for bringing on board new federal employees would be waived to fill the vacancies. We will discuss more about the budget and resources provided to the VA in the next panel. Congress also provided the Secretary of the VA with nearly unprecedented ability to terminate senior executives who fail to care for our veterans. No other Cabinet official has this powerful tool to ensure performance and results from his departments top officials. I continue to be disappointed that Secretary McDonald has not used this authority to its fullest extent. As I have said, it is past time for accountability, and leadership at the VA. With this in mind, I especially want to thank our three witnesses who are here today on our first panel: First is Dr. Katherine Mitchell. Dr. Mitchell is a former employee of the Phoenix VA Medical Center and a whistleblower. When she raised critical issues regarding quality care for veterans and scheduling of appointments, she was rewarded by the VA by being reassigned and threatened with the termination of her job. She was one of the first to come forward regarding the wait-list scandal and the manipulation of data that was being done in order for VA bureaucrats to score higher bonuses, while veterans languished awaiting necessary medical care. Thanks to Dr. Mitchells willingness to step forward and share the details this scandal, I believe many others were motivated to also come forward to tell their stories of retaliation and lack of care of veterans at the VA. We are, unfortunately, discovering more examples of mismanagement of the VA while we work to improve the current situation with health care at the VA. Mr. Charles Chuck Byers is a Vietnam veteran himself and an advocate for veterans here in Phoenix. His ability to receive care through the Choice program is a success; he is able to see the doctors he needs to get the care he needs when he needs it. Recognizing that theres always room for improvement, we want to hear what is working for veterans with the VA Choice Card as we seek to reform it. Finally, today we have Ms. Nicole Morris who is a Navy veteran and single mother. While Ms. Morris is entitled to health care through the VA, she pays out-of-pocket to get the care she needs from the private sector just because the VA simply cannot meet her health needs in a timely manner. Her experience is far too common. Were here to help her and other veterans like her finally get the benefits we envisioned when Congress passed the Veterans Access, Choice, and Accountability Act last year. As I am sure everyone in this room agrees, we owe a solemn debt to those in uniform who fought on our behalf in faraway places. They have sacrificed and suffered for their service and bear wounds they will never completely recover from and we can never fully compensate them for. But we can and must care for the injuries they suffered on our behalf. I do want to make a brief comment on the make-up of our second panel today, which will consist of VA witnesses, as there has been a last-minute change. Late Friday afternoon, my staff was informed that the VA determined that a senior manager at the Phoenix VA, who was originally due to testify today, retaliated against a VA whistleblower. In light of this recent information, he will not be testifying this morning while we determine what has occurred with this case. Needless to say, I take the issue of whistleblower retaliation at the VA very seriously and have been discussing the matter with Secretary McDonald, especially in light of concerns about systemic problems that the Office of Special Counsel raised directly with the president a few months ago. After todays hearing, I am sending a letter to Secretary McDonald to find out exactly what occurred in the retaliation case we were just made aware of and how it was handled. With that in mind, we have a number of issues to cover that more broadly impact Arizona veterans and many of the veterans who are here today to tell us about their experiences. Today, I'll be focusing on the Choice Card's implementation and continuing problems with excessive wait times that our veterans are encountering. For the 9 million American veterans enrolled in the VA today, and for the families who lost loved ones awaiting care that never came and still grieving their losses, it's time we live up to the VAs mission, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan. Thank you again to our witnesses and to others here today who care about the well-being of our nations heroes. Senator McCain also submitted the following statement for the record on the hearings second panel: As we all know the Phoenix VA Health Care System was ground zero for the wait-list scandal that erupted at the VA last year. Through disclosures by whistleblowers and investigations by Congress, we learned that Phoenix maintained two separate and conflicting lists of patients waiting for care. The waitlists for VA and senior leaders showed things being fine while in reality veterans waited for years for primary care and specialty care appointments. Further, the emergency room at the Phoenix VA was continually overrun with veterans who logically attempted to receive care by emergency providers when they could not see their doctors through the normal appointment process. Of course, this put certain other veterans with life-threatening conditions at risk as the staff in the emergency room was not trained or resourced properly. The scandal last year also revealed hostile working conditions for medical providers at Phoenix and retaliation for whistleblowers. Sadly, many good doctors and nurses have already left the Phoenix VA, probably never to return. I am thankful for those quality health care providers that have stayed and for others being hired today who are accepting the challenge of working in a massive bureaucracy filled with red tape and lacking in reform and leadership from the top. These health care professionals, who clearly have opportunities elsewhere, do so out of concern for our veterans and we should recognize that. Despite the scandal and all the attention paid to Phoenix by the VA leadership, a year and a half later, we are still not seeing the improvement and reductions in wait-times we should in the wait-lists for care at the Phoenix VA. The Phoenix VA Health Care System still lags well behind the VAs national average in delayed care for primary and specialty care appointments. As you can see here, according to the VAs own numbers, the wait times have not been improving at all over the last few months. As we are currently in the busier winter season for VA facilities here in Arizona, this is likely to get worse through next year. Nationally, the statistics for wait times for veterans also appear to be flat and no longer improving. This is why we are here today because our work to repair what has been revealed about the true operations of the VA is in no way complete and we must not rest until it is. It is astounding that the wait-list scandal occurred given the massive budget that the VA has and the repeated significant increases in funding they have received since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over a decade ago. No federal agency, including the Pentagon, has seen such large and regular budget increases since 9/11. As you can see here, the Veteran Health Administration, the part of the VA responsible for health care, has tripled. The budget has tripled but the number of veterans seen at the VA has not tripled. Its only up 50% over the last 15 years. So were spending twice as much money on each veteran we still arent getting the health outcomes our veterans deserve. For years, we have been told the VA needs a bigger budget. So we gave them a bigger budget. Then in 2009 we were told that the VA needed advance appropriations for medical services so they could plan and provide seamless transition over fiscal years to veterans. So Congress gave them advance appropriations. Most federal agencies have no idea what they are going to get until after the fiscal year starts. The VA has said it needs expedited hiring authority to bring on medical providers quickly because the hiring process in the federal government is so slow and they had shortages of doctors and nurses. So we granted that authority to the VA in last years Veterans Access, Choice, and Accountability Act. Also, the VA received $15 billion in immediate and emergency appropriations given to the VA last year for medical services above and beyond their already generous budget. Included in that funding was billions for the hiring of medical providers at the VA as well as funding for the VA Choice Card which allows veterans to get care from the private sector similar to military retirees. The VA Choice Card has been a qualified success so far. David McIntyre is here representing TriWest, which is one of the two companies that is helping connect veterans with private sector doctors. Over the last year, the VA Choice Card has been used for over 600,000 private sector appointments for veterans. Here in Phoenix, over 2,000 veteran appointments were made each month through the VA Choice Card in the last three months of the fiscal year. I believe all of this points to the simplest solution: we will give disabled veterans the same health care choices and access that other Americans have. This is not a radical idea. For decades military retirees have used TRICARE to receive care from the private sector while still utilizing Military Treatment Facilities. Of course, millions of seniors are on Medicare. It is astounding to me that we have set up a system whereby people who do not serve and sacrifice for their country have better health care choices than people who do. Id be interested in hearing from the witnesses whether we as a nation should continue to go to the one group of Americans who raised their hand to take an oath to defend this country, who went and were injured from their military service, and say to them: No, you do not get to choose your own doctor or make your own medical decisions. You will accept what we give you when we decide to give it. The American people do not feel that way. So, Congress last year piloted the VA Choice Card program. Unfortunately, the pilot program was all we could get through at the time given the circumstances. The VA Choice Card program has a number of unnecessary barriers on it such as a minimum number of days that an appointment has to be delayed to a minimum number of miles you have to live from a VA facility. These restrictions only empower the bureaucrats at the cost of the veteran. It is not right but it was the best we could do under the circumstances. With that in mind, I recently introduced legislation to get rid of both of those absurd requirements. Under my bill, the VA Choice Card will be permanent and universal. Any disabled veteran enrolled at the VA and otherwise eligible for care will have the same rights and benefits as a military retiree or a senior on Medicare. The VA needs to get on board and behind this effort. As I stated earlier, the wait-list scandal caused a crisis of confidence. With a universal VA Choice Card and with further improvements in leadership and accountability, the agency created to care for veterans can start to build back the confidence and trust it has lost. I thank the witnesses for their willingness to testify and again I thank the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee for holding this important oversight hearing here in Phoenix where this scandal began. ### | 1 | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z |