Veterans tell horror stories about VA's Veterans Choice

Clyde Murray, a veteran from Operation Iraqi Freedom, has traumatic brain injury, 70 percent PTSD, only has 61 percent of his lungs remaining and those are just a few of the conditions he has, and he struggles to get the new U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' Veterans Choice program to cover.

That was just one of the stories told to the staff of Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., who came to the Havre-Hill County Library Thursday to hear from local residents about the controversial program to help the Veterans Administration partner with outside health care to provide medical care to veterans.

Tester, who is a member of the Senate Veterans

Affairs Committee, has been having his staff conduct these outreach sessions to gather information and feedback about how to improve Veteran's Choice.

The program came about after a high-profile scandal at the Phoenix VA

Center in 2014 and was meant to offer services that the VA is ill-equipped to offer.

Instead, it has only multiplied the frustration, lengthy wait times and inefficiencies veterans have experienced, people at the meeting said.

"And up until a year ago the VA was the best choice in the world," said Sylvia Murray, Clyde Murray's wife.

Sylvia Murray said she is tired of hearing unsympathetic people telling her and her husband they should have known what they were getting into and instead get their own insurance.

In example after example, Sylvia and Clyde Murray offered evidence of how they are victims of a cumbersome, ineffective bureaucracy.

About a month ago, Clyde Murray went to see his primary care physician who thought he had pneumonia after he had trouble breathing.

"This is really scary stuff," Sylvia Murray said.

She said her husband needed chest x-rays and they went to a clinic that scheduled them right away.

They then received paperwork from Veterans Choice. They were then told by the program that because they didn't wait for the program to schedule that appointment, Clyde and Sylvia would have to pay for it themselves.

"Five days later, if he had pneumonia he would have had to go into the hospital," Sylvia Murray said.

And the Murrays detailed other anecdotal evidence of a program rife with inefficiencies. Information the Murrays were told had been in the computer system two years ago, they later learned wasn't. They contacted Choice to make appointments, but they still haven't heard back those appointments.

It took Clyde Murray five months to get a pair of glasses. Despite going to Dr. Marc Whitacre for the past 10 years, the program required them to go to a different clinic.

Sylvia Murray insisted they were going to Whitacre.

The Choice program did schedule them an appointment at the other clinic. Wait times to schedule an appointment, she said, have increased from one month to two, three or even longer.

Murray added that the Choice program takes a long time to get records from doctors to the VA, making good quality care difficult to obtain.

Veteran Steve Mulonet said he had wanted to wait to schedule an appointment to ensure that it did not conflict with his work schedule.

Choice went ahead and scheduled an appointment for him anyway.

"That has been my experience so far, and it hasn't been a very happy one," Mulonet said.

Sylvia Murray said that she feels the VA is trying to cut them out of the system.

Tester's staff members said that is not the case. They say a significant amount of money is spent referring veterans to outside providers because the VA in general and Montana as a whole is having trouble recruiting doctors.

Part of this they say, is the fact that doctors can make more in the private sector than they can working in the VA system. The VA they say is trying to do more with the money they have, which is why they have to refer care out to the community.

They say new changes made no longer require that patient records go through Health Net Federal Services, the managed care support contractor that links patients and the VA with outside care providers. Instead they can be sent from doctors to the main VA clinic in Fort Harrison.

Robyn Madison, a member of Tester's staff, said the senator is fighting for more flexibility in the program for Montana veterans, given that the needs of veterans vary from state to state.

Providers are also frustrated with the Choice program.

Cathee Litzinger, who works for Havre Optometric Clinic, said that since choice has taken over some services from the VA the clinic has experienced problems.

She said that since November, they have only been paid for two exams for veterans through the Choice program and their Chinook office has not received any payments.

"So the work that we do to get our vets the glasses that they need to see, we have not gotten paid for since November," Litzinger said.

She said no money has been set aside by the program for the work that has been done in helping vets get their glasses. Litzinger said this forces the clinic to either provide this service without pay or send veterans all the way to Fort Harrison to get their glasses.

Litzinger also said they have often had to send Health Net the same paperwork as much as three times, with faxes they send often not getting to Health Net.

Clyde Murray said that, looking back, the Choice program was a reaction to a serious and highly publicized problem and was constructed in haste.

Rather than stopping and examining the complex problems that were specific to the Phoenix VA and seeing what works in other VA clinics, the government instead decided to just spend more money and hire more people, and implement a poorly structured plan that upended everything, he said.

"Yes, Phoenix had a major problem. Montana didn't," Clyde Murray said.