When the scandal erupted last year over long wait lists at the Phoenix VA, Alaska was found to have quite short wait times. The Alaska VA has for years been buying care for veterans outside the VA, at community and private-sector clinics, and especially through the Native health care system. The concept is dubbed “Care Closer to Home.” That’s the model Congress chose when it passed the Veterans Choice Act last year, aimed at solving the backlog for VA services in the Lower 48. But as the new Choice program spreads across the country and takes hold in Alaska, vets and providers say it’s undoing parts of the Alaska-grown system that have worked well.
Alaska’s congressional delegation has received dozens of calls from angry veterans. Vets say clinics they’d been going to aren’t accepting Choice, and that appointments elsewhere are hard or impossible to get. They tell of long hold times to reach TriWest call centers, emails that get no response and broken links on VA websites.
“This is a threat to a collaborative effort that has been built over a period of years that has been very beneficial to our veterans,” she said earlier this month.
She fired off a four-alarm letter to the VA secretary. Congressman Don Young sent his own this week, and Sen. Dan Sullivan called for a congressional hearing. By late this week, the VA relented, in part: They’ve restored funds for non-Native veterans to get care at Native hospitals and clinics.
In Alaska, the new Choice program is baffling for some vets not well situated to cope with it. Jesse Gotschall, of Anchorage, was a truck driver in the Army. He served in both Iraq and Aghanistan.
“I have back problems, right? And I need help with it,” he says.
He says accupuncture and chiropractic care help him stand up straight so he can work. He also has PTSD, and trouble remembering things. It was hard enough for him to learn how to use the VA system before the rules changed. Now, he says, he feels like he’s trying to play chess on a Scrabble board.
“I honestly don’t know. And like, that’s part of the problem,” he said. “I try to figure this stuff out and I don’t know where to call, and you try to talk to someone and (you’re told) ‘you gotta do this, you gotta do that.’”
The Alaska VA director says they’re planning a big campaign to explain the Choice program to veterans.
See Full Story at Alaska Public Media
