WASHINGTON -- Congressional lawmakers struggled Tuesday to reach an agreement to prop up a multibillion-dollar health care program that allows veterans to see a private doctor at government expense.
The task was supposed to be relatively easy, meant to buy lawmakers time as they debated the future of the program. As recently as last week, Republican leaders were considering using a bill temporarily funding the Veterans Choice Program as a vehicle to raise the debt ceiling, a perennially bitter pill for Republicans.
Instead, House Republicans put forward a plan that would pay for the visits by diverting funds from elsewhere in the department and would not allocate additional funds for in-house care. In doing so, they galvanized enough opposition among Democrats and a raft of veterans groups fearful of creeping privatization that the bill failed Monday night to clear the necessary threshold on the House floor.
The defeat left House leaders scrambling for an alternative, with only a handful of legislative days left before the chamber is scheduled to begin its extended summer recess. Money for the Veterans Choice Program is expected to run out early next month.
Lawmakers in the Senate, where legislation would need to pick up some Democratic support to come to a vote, never appeared likely to take up the House measure. Behind the scenes, leaders of the veterans committees in both chambers had opened negotiations to find a compromise acceptable to their members as well the veterans groups.
The Senate has said it will stick around for the first two weeks of August.
Created in the aftermath of a 2014 scandal over the manipulation of patient wait times at Department of Veterans Affairs health care facilities, the Veterans Choice Program was intended to give veterans facing long wait times for care an option to see private doctors in their communities. It came with additional time and money for the department to retool. Three years later, both parties and most veterans groups are in agreement that the program has done some good but needs repairs.
The present funding crisis largely stems from the program's rapid growth in popularity and miscalculations by the department of how quickly the program would run out of money.
As patient visits through the program have increased -- they were up more than 30 percent in the first quarter of fiscal 2017 -- resources have been depleted more quickly than expected, catching lawmakers off-guard.
The veterans groups opposing the House legislation -- including Disabled American Veterans, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, Veterans of Foreign Wars and Vietnam Veterans of America -- wield considerable influence in Washington, and their opposition is taken seriously on Capitol Hill.
The groups sent a letter to lawmakers Saturday objecting to the bill's terms and spent the weekend lobbying congressional staff members. They say the plan, which provides $2 billion to cover program expenses for six months without adding any funds to departmental programs, would push veterans out of the latter without addressing the systemic problems that prompted the creation of the Veterans Choice Program in the first place.
"You just can't give money to send people out of the system while neglecting to put money into the system to fix the capacity problem that is there," said Garry Augustine, Washington director for Disabled American Veterans. "We believe that is a slippery slope to dismantling the VA."
The opposition from veterans groups was not unanimous. Several large groups declined to stake out a position, and at least one, the Concerned Veterans for America, embraced the plan. The small conservative advocacy organization linked to the free-market activist billionaires Charles and David Koch has long made it its mission to offer more private sector choices for veterans' health care.
The committee's top Democrat, Rep. Tim Walz of Minnesota, had implored House leaders to delay the vote to give both chambers time to strike a deal and took issue with how the $2 billion extension was funded. Rather than require that the extension funds be offset, he said, Congress should grant the funding on an emergency basis.
Such changes, along with funds for in-house care, are now likely to get fuller consideration among Senate leaders who face a more moderate Republican caucus and the task of winning over some Democrats. A spokesman for Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., the Senate committee's chairman, declined Monday to comment on the negotiations.
A Section on 07/26/2017