The Department of Veterans Affairs providing certain veterans with prescription-only health care benefits
Good morning, Chairman Simmons, Ranking Member Rodriguez, and other distinguished members of the House Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Veterans Affairs. On behalf of National President Thomas H. Corey, we thank you for the opportunity for Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA) to appear here today to share our views on the issue of “Transitional Pharmacy Benefits” at the Veterans Health Administration facilities of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). I ask that you enter our full statement in the record, and I will briefly summarize the most important points of our statement.The “Transitional Pharmacy Benefit” would never have been necessary if the veterans health care system were fully and properly funded to take care of the veterans who are statutorily eligible to use the VHA system. If there were anything approaching adequate funding, there would have been no need to promulgate the regulation issued to accomplish the filling of prescriptions written by non-VA physicians as there would never have been waiting periods of longer than thirty days. This would have rendered the premise of VHA Directive 2003-047 (issued August 14, 2003, and affecting veterans enrolled in VA health care by July 25, 2003) and other various legislative proposals moot. This is but one more good reason why we need mandatory funding for health care for America’s veterans.When VVA received notice of this hearing late last week, we sent out messages soliciting thoughts and data from our Service Representatives and from the VVA National and State leadership who are geographically dispersed across the nation. The reports were that it was not utilized because there was no waiting list longer than 30 days at the local VA Medical Center, or that the “Transitional Pharmacy Benefit” was working well, and in the manner intended by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs. The reports are consistently favorable. The VA pharmacy service is doing a very good to excellent job with this program, and that veterans and veteran’s advocates at the local level are pleased with this benefit, if not the reasons that made it necessary.It is worth noting that the pharmacy operation has so improved in the last two decades that it is now one of the best-run VA programs. It is generally effective, efficient, and is constantly improving based on clinician and veteran reactions and suggestions. Of all the VA operations, it is the one that appears to be truly operating on the “Demming” method, devised by the late W. Edwards Demming, of constant improvements, with many of these modifications being small but some large, that result in an increasingly more effective operation at the least possible cost. It is indeed ironic that the pharmacy operation should apparently be one of the areas targeted for eventual outsourcing by the Office of Management
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