[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 14]
[Senate]
[Pages 20553-20554]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




               VA ACCOUNTABILITY AND VETERANS HEALTHCARE

  Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, let me mention something that is very 
significant to me personally. I remember it was 2 years ago today that 
I picked up USA TODAY, and in a USA TODAY article, they singled out my 
State of Oklahoma and said that we are not treating our veterans right. 
We were in shock at that time. In fact, the article detailed some 
really appalling things that were going on and were not going on in my 
State of Oklahoma. There were things the inspector general reported 
during the Obama administration that we had no way of knowing about.
  We seem to have more veterans per capita in Oklahoma. One of the 
reasons is we have five major military establishments, and Oklahoma is 
a great place to live, so a lot of them retire there. They were not 
getting the help they need, and they were not getting the treatment to 
the highest standards that were available.
  This isn't how we take care of veterans in Oklahoma. Senator Lankford

[[Page 20554]]

and I and two of the House Members worked on this and talked to 
regional Veterans' Administration leadership. We talked to the 
veterans. We talked to whistleblowers. And we identified three key 
problems that we needed to fix. This is interesting because these are 
three problems in my State of Oklahoma, but they would be the same 
thing in Nebraska or any other State because it is not just in our 
State of Oklahoma.
  The first one was that the VA couldn't fire bad employees.
  This is always a problem. You go into an organization and you find 
that things are not going very well because there are one or two bad 
employees. Yet it takes you a year before you are able to get rid of 
these people. Despite having been identified, it takes forever to 
terminate an employee.
  Well, we fixed that this past summer when President Trump signed the 
VA Accountability Act that included our language to allow the Secretary 
of Veterans Affairs to immediately fire employees for misconduct or 
poor performance. That was successful. We did it. That is history.
  I have to say that during President Trump's administration so far, he 
has used this firing authority on over 500 bad actors from the VA, and 
we are finally creating a culture of accountability in the VA, which is 
having positive results. That is the first reform.
  The second one: Too many veterans were forced to receive care from VA 
facilities that were hours away or didn't provide specialized care.
  This is a problem. A lot of these veterans don't have the capability 
to move around and get the care they need, and they didn't have the 
choices. So we actually had to make a change, and we did. We worked 
with the President and reauthorized the bipartisan VA Choice Program.
  The VA Choice Program is great because it allowed our veterans to 
actually, in those hard-to-reach areas, get high-quality healthcare, 
regardless of where they had to travel to get it done. That was a 
success.
  Finally, after the USA TODAY article, we requested an accredited 
third-party look at the problem at our VA facilities because previous 
reports from the Obama Veterans Affairs inspector general failed to 
identify and correct these problems. Well, my request was denied. It is 
just like any bureaucracy. They don't want someone looking over their 
shoulder, so they said: No, we are not going to allow you to have a 
third party accompany the VA to look into the problem that you have.
  Some are not aware of this, but in the Senate, when someone is 
nominated, we can put a hold on them and not allow them to go through 
confirmation--at least for a long period of time. At that time, the 
President--our current President--had nominated a person to be the 
inspector general of the Veterans' Administration. We put a hold on him 
until they allowed someone to come in and monitor the evaluation that 
the VA was doing of their own bureaucracy in Oklahoma. That worked, 
except the problem with that is it was a one-time authorization. We 
needed to make that a permanent part of our structure. I am pleased to 
say we did that.
  When we signed the Enhancing Veteran Care Act, it permanently granted 
the VISN directors--that is one of the director levels of the VA--and 
gave the medical center directors the authority to request, at their 
request, an outside oversight in order to evaluate what they had done. 
It has been very successful.
  It is important for the regional directors to have the authority 
because they have the best idea of the reality of care at their 
facilities.
  I appreciate the work of my colleagues, Senator James Lankford, 
Congressman Markwayne Mullin, and Congressman Steve Russell. It turned 
out to be a real good team, and we are able to get these things done. 
We are already starting to see real progress in improving the veterans' 
care in Oklahoma and across the country because as we are improving the 
system we had in Oklahoma, that same system can be improved in Nebraska 
or any other State.
  We need to get our VA facilities from their current ratings to the 
highest standard. The highest standard rating is five stars. We are now 
up to three stars in Oklahoma. We were at one star when we first 
discovered this problem on that fateful day 2 years ago today in an 
article in USA TODAY.
  President Trump will continue to be an important partner for Oklahoma 
as we continue to improve our veterans' care.

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