Another troubling aspect of the Bush administration’s handling of veterans is what is known as demand management: If funding is below demand, then do what is necessary to reduce demand. This is exactly what the VA has done with the program known as Veterans Outreach. This program, created by Congress in 1970, was intended to ensure that all veterans receive “timely and appropriate assistance to aid and encourage them in applying for and obtaining” federal benefits and services. To fulfill this purpose, Congress charged the VA “with the affirmative duty of seeking out eligible veterans and eligible dependents and providing them” with the federal benefits and services to which they are entitled.
In July 2002, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs Deputy Secretary for Operation and Management, Laura Miller, issued a memorandum to all VA Network Directors regarding the agency’s Outreach policy toward veterans. In her statement, Miller instructed all Network Directors to “ensure that no marketing activities to enroll new veterans occur within your networks.” It goes on to say that “[e]ven though some sites might have local capacity … all facilities are expected to abide by this policy.” In effect, VA employees were specifically directed to refrain from actively recruiting more people into the VA health care system and to provide only general information.
Representative Ted Strickland, Democrat from Ohio, objected strongly to the VA position on Outreach. According to Strickland’s office, Principi defended this policy, stating in a letter to Strickland in January 2003: “I made the decision to temporarily restrict marketing in order to conserve scarce fiscal resources for the veterans already enrolled in the VA system.”
Shortly after Principi’s letter, Congressman Strickland and Thomas Corey, the president of Vietnam Veterans of America, filed suit in federal court “to compel the VA to comply with its legal obligation to inform potential patients and beneficiaries of available VA programs and services.” The lawsuit states that, “Congress has explicitly directed the VA to perform outreach services to ensure that veterans and their families are aware of services and benefits to which they are entitled.”
The Knight Ridder newspaper group recently reported the results of its analysis of the number of veterans who are potentially missing out on disability payments and who would benefit if Outreach were to be aggressively implemented. Using the VA’s own survey data, Knight Ridder estimates the number of such veterans at 572,000. If only a third of these veterans turned out to be eligible, the cost would be about $1.5 billion. But as we’ve seen, while this amount is pocket change compared to the Bush tax cuts and the war in Iraq, or the recent Medicare bill at $500 billion dollars, for veterans, sadly, this is big money.