Morgan Luttrell Asks VA Sec. Doug Collins About Coordination With DoD To Ensure Quality Veteran Care

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During a House Veterans' Affairs Committee hearing last week, Rep. Morgan Luttrell (R-TX) questioned VA Secretary Doug Collins about coordination with the Department of Defense.

Transcript

00:00All right, so now we have 9 million veterans, we have roughly about 1.3, 1.5 plus or minus

00:11service members currently, and of course recruiting's up, recruiting's down, but the transition

00:16that will inevitably happen from active duty to our veteran space. Now one of the challenges

00:20that I often hear about, see about, as a veteran myself and have gone through, when the veteran

00:25enters into the VA space, then the process starts. Now, as easy as that can be for some

00:32veterans, or as painstaking a process as that can be for veterans, I'll always say it seems

00:39to be problematic. Once the veteran initiates the claim, if you will, then he goes into

00:47the VSOs, goes into the rating system, goes up to the national work queue, it disappears

00:50into the metaverse, and sometimes it gets lost, sometimes it gets found. I won't get into the

00:54national work queue with you today. Then we run into systematic problems along the way,

01:00not for every veteran, but for veterans nonetheless. I truly and honestly believe that there was

01:07a transitional period between leaving active duty service, where the service member's record

01:14is buttoned up, top to bottom, inside and out, take the veteran more or less out of the equation,

01:19almost all the way out of the equation. In the record, however, that may transition from this

01:26active service to veteran service, and then it starts the process on its own. Now, I know we can do

01:33that. My question is, will you, not have you, it's too early, but will you consider or will you please

01:44engage with SecDef, start these conversations? I've had this conversation with him, and I don't know if

01:50you have or not, but everyone understands the problem. Everyone understands that the transition

01:55between the two should be seamless, and for decades and decades and decades, we hear about this. This

02:04would be the greatest opportunity that we could have to catch people on the wrong trajectory that we may,

02:08that may be suicidal ideologies, may have a health care problem, something that we miss, because when

02:15you're in the service and you're on the train, you're front sight focused, laser focused on the

02:19problem set that exists in front of you, and that bullet train's traveling down the track a thousand

02:23miles an hour, and it does not stop for us to get off. We jump, and everything that we jump with

02:29goes in a thousand different directions, and then it's our responsibility to try to find it somewhere in

02:33every place that we were stationed to put it together to give to the VA, and then the VA's has that

02:38it's their responsibility to help the veterans with that, and we know how painstaking of a process

02:44that can be. So my question is, will you, sir, please engage with the DOD and start baseline

02:52assessment from the time that we come in through the time that we transition out into the time into

02:55the veteran space so our veterans are better taken care of? You know, in looking at an oversight and

03:02what we're talking about right here, it's probably one of the most pertinent questions I think we've had,

03:06and I appreciate all the questions we have today, but you've hit at something that's very important

03:10to me because it is the trigger mechanism for many of the bad outcomes that we see either not getting

03:18care, having a bad experience with care, then leaving the care, or not getting the benefits

03:24that they have. Just recently, I was at Medell Air Force Base, and we had their medical side there,

03:28the Air Force medical side, and we had our veteran benefits office personnel there, some of their senior

03:33leadership, and I asked the question just because we were talking about how this was transitioning

03:37out, and they said, I asked our benefits coordinator, I said, how many of you get people coming in who

03:42have no experience or no knowledge of what their benefits are, and to almost to a person, they said,

03:49most everybody. So I've already started that conversation with SecDef. In fact, we started it

03:54before either one of us were confirmed, and because here is the bigger issue that we've got to deal

03:59with with TAPS, and this is our transition assistance program. It is, and I say this in a generic form,

04:06so any reporter here, please listen to what I'm saying. TAPS is owned by DOD, in which they don't

04:14really have a good plan because of the way it's positioned, as you well know, you know, to give

04:1912 months, 18 months, however you transition out, and it goes through this contract, not deploying them,

04:26but this is just their issue. So DOD owns TAPS, and I'm blamed for it, and I think this is the part that

04:32we've got to look at as we go forward. There's got to be a more seamless transition for that, and we've

04:37already started. I think you're going to see something pretty soon about that. I just wanted to let you

04:40know that the Secretary of Defense and I have talked about it. The last part on that is that question

04:46that I think, no matter what we do, one of my priorities is going to be is those that have issues

04:52coming out, having warm handoffs, basically straight into VHA, especially those who are

04:58having issues with mental health issues, TBI, PTS, and those kind of things. Because DOD has

05:03absolute authority to gather all that information and share that with the VA, and just the complexities

05:12of the global threat currently that's developing, our generation is coming into the VA. Our older

05:21generation, we're losing them. But if, worst case scenario, if we have to go all in again,

05:29it's just, the wave is just going to, and I need the VA to be ready. Yeah, exactly. We're, that's also

05:34one of the emphasis of the President as well, is that fourth mission of the VA, which is our disaster

05:38and natural response. And also, our, we're the actual backstop. There's not a, without going into

05:44classified information, which we would never do here, the VA is always a part of any national

05:49contingency that would come up in any, any type of scenario that we have. So we've got to be ready

05:54for that and make sure our workforce is developed. But I want to, real quick enough, if I could,

05:58one of the issues that bothers me most about our transition part right now is, is statistics show

06:03us that a shorter time of service, a three to six year or three to seven year time of service

06:08is a drastically higher propensity for death by suicide from not just when they get out, not just

06:15three or four years later, but upwards of 40 years later, they're seeing statistics to say that shorter

06:20time frame. So that's why transition is so important. Correct. Because there's no difference

06:23with somebody that served six months to somebody who served 60 years, period. Thank you. I yield, sir.

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