WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) commended the U.S. Senate’s passage today of the Expanding Capacity for Health Outcomes Act (ECHO Act, S. 2873). The bipartisan bill would integrate an innovative continuing medical education model into health systems across the country, expanding the use of telemedicine to provide specialty care to patients in rural areas.

“Kansans enjoy a special way of life that would not be possible without access to quality health care,” said Sen. Moran. “It is often a struggle, however, to provide specialty care in many of our rural communities. Telemedicine is an important tool we can utilize to get patients in rural areas access to these services. The model expanded by this legislation holds promise to expand medical capabilities in rural America and helps make best-practice care available to more Kansans regardless of where they live.”

The legislation passed the Senate 97-0 and now awaits consideration by the U.S. House of Representatives.

###

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) today commended the Senate’s passage of the Veterans Mobility Safety Act (H.R. 3471) with provisions from Sen. Moran to improve the quality and safety of mobility equipment for disabled veterans. The legislation, which was spearheaded by Sen. Moran in the Senate, also includes language to improve the accessibility of hearing aid services for veterans seeking treatment at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health care facilities.

“More than 1 million American veterans live with disabilities connected to their service,” said Sen. Moran. “We must uphold our promise to provide quality care to those who sacrificed for our country. That care extends to the installation of equipment like wheelchair lifts and reduced-effort steering systems, which allow disabled veterans greater mobility and independence. This legislation makes certain the VA adheres to and enforces the highest quality and safety standards for mobility products.”

Current eligible disabled veterans may access automotive mobility products and benefits through the VA’s Automobile Adaptive Equipment (AAE) program. This legislation would require the VA to implement comprehensive quality standards for the providers of AAE mobility equipment. This will ensure that disabled veterans, their families and other drivers stay safe on our roads with properly-installed equipment from certified providers.

Sen. Moran continued, “I am also pleased this legislation includes common-sense improvements to increase veterans’ access to hearing specialists. Approximately 60 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans experience hearing loss and should not be forced to wait weeks or months to receive the care they deserve. There is a growing demand of veterans in need of services related to hearing loss, and this provides the VA with greater flexibility to treat our heroes.”

The language addressing hearing specialists is based on standalone legislation Sen. Moran introduced last year, the Veterans Hearing Aid Access and Assistance Act (S. 564).

H.R. 3471 is supported by numerous veterans’ organizations, including Paralyzed Veterans of America, Disabled American Veterans, Blinded Veterans Association, Military Order of the Purple Heart and Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States. Full text is available here.

###

Several years ago, our nation was appalled, it was a national news story, and we were appalled to learn that Department of Veterans Affairs employees from across the country were creating secret waiting lists that stood between veterans and the care they deserved. Veterans died waiting for care because of deceptive practices at the VA.

In the wake of that wrongdoing, I called for the resignation of the then Secretary of Department of Veterans Affairs. At the time, I didn’t think things at the agency could worse at the department. But, I was wrong.

During current-VA Secretary Bob McDonald’s confirmation hearings in 2014, he seemed to understand the urgency demanded by the American people and by their Congress to fix the problems at the Department of Veterans Affairs.   

In his testimony he promised that, “The seriousness of this moment demands action…those employees that have violated the trust of the nation and of veterans must be, and will be, held accountable.” 

Now more than two years later, with the authorities granted by Congress and signed into law by the president, the secretary seems to have forgotten that promise.

Time and time again the secretary uses a talking point on accountability, stating that “the VA has terminated more than 4,095 employees” since the secretary arrived. The real number of terminations is three.

Only three people have been discharged from the VA for their misconduct. And another 12 to 15 are – “potential removals for demotions.” 

What the secretary hasn’t said is that thousands of those, “terminations” were actually employees placed on “paid leave,” thereby racking up $23 million to pay the salaries of 2,500 VA employees who weren’t actually working. 

The opportunity for the secretary and for the VA to hold bad actors accountable has been squandered. The terrible part of this is that Americans have been misled.

The accountability the VA created in the wake of scandal, about the fake waiting lists, has generated further disappointment and scandal due to mismanagement and manipulation. Instead of firing people, Americans are paying bad actors to do nothing, or worse yet they have been transferred to other facilities to continue bad practices. 

The morale of the hard-working, the vast majority, the huge number of people who work for the VA, many who are veterans themselves, their morale has to be harmed, as they care for veterans every day and suffer in this culture of corruption.

In Kansas, my home state, we face one of the worst examples of a VA employee violating the trust of a veteran. Yet the VA seems to have no sense of urgency in holding this person accountable or committing to fix the process that enabled this individual to do what he did. 

In 2015, we learned from newspaper reports – certainly not from the VA – that a physician assistant at the Leavenworth VA hospital, Mr. Mark Wisner, had been sexually abusing veteran patients.

Shortly after that news broke, the Leavenworth County prosecutors charged this individual with multiple counts of sexual assault and abuse against numerous veterans.

We learned as the story unfolded that he targeted vulnerable veterans suffering from PTSD. He prescribed opioids that inhibited their thinking, and he used his position to deepen the wounds of war rather than healing them.

I’ll share a quote from two Army veteran brothers who were patients, and felt they had no choice but to continue seeking his care or lose the healthcare benefits they had earned…One of them said, “the fear of losing what I earned [in benefits] versus the fear of being sexually assaulted again, I didn’t know which one was more important.”

Can you imagine the desperation of a veteran trying to answer that question?

Again, so troubling about this situation is that Mr. Wisner should have never been hired by the VA in the first place. And as we add injury to insult, for these veteran victims, he was not fired after he admitted the abuse. He was allowed to retire and his “voluntary retirement” means that he receives certain benefits that he might not otherwise receive if he’d actually been fired.

According to publicly available documents, Mr. Wisner indicated on his application for licensure that he had been convicted of a crime, and further information indicates that the crime and convictions were lewd in nature. Yet he was hired. 

It is infuriating, it’s worse than infuriating, that a person with a criminal record, convicted of a lewd crime, was still hired to be on the front lines of veteran patient care. 

When the VA was asked about his criminal record, they indicated that background checks are contingent upon the “position’s risk level”, and that physician assistant positions were considered “low risk,” and didn’t require an exhaustive background check.

In my view, a practitioner in patient care should be held to the highest standards of excellence, and should receive an exhaustive background check. How can a position in patient care be considered “low risk” at the VA?

Fortunately, as I said, I serve with you on the Veterans’ committee, and I had the opportunity during one of our committee hearings last September, just a few months ago, to question the secretary, to question Secretary McDonald about the background check process and why Mr. Wisner was hired with a known criminal background.

The secretary’s response was “there was nothing in his file that suggested that this was a risk.” He also suggested that I had different information than he did, he the secretary did, which is hard to believe because the documentation I was reading from, the circumstances I was describing, came directly from his own Office of Inspector General. 

I also sent the secretary a letter with more than 20 questions about this situation, hoping that I could receive substantive answers to those questions.

More than two months passed until I received a response last week from the Undersecretary for Health. I was actually hoping to learn something from that response about the VA’s commitment to fixing their hiring practices, not a canned answer regarding the VA’s current process for background checks.

Certainly the 20 questions asked of the secretary remain unanswered. And they remain unanswered regarding why the VA’s credentialing process failed to catch Mr. Wisner, a convict.

Does the VA not consider lewd crimes or convictions in an applicant’s file as a risk to veterans?

The responses have been unacceptable, the lack of response has been unacceptable. But also unacceptable are the circumstances surrounding Mr. Wisner’s separation from the VA. Instead of an immediate termination, unbelievably, he was permitted to retire with full benefits.   

When the VA police received a complaint about Mr. Wisner in May of 2014, they alerted the VA Inspector General. Wisner was removed from patient care and placed on paid administrative leave while the IG conducted its investigation.

Some days later in an interview with the VA Inspector General Special Agent, Wisner admitted that he “crossed the professional lines,” and that he engaged in “unnecessary and inappropriate behavior of a sexual kind.”

Mr. Wisner made no attempt to hide his actions, stating that he “knew what he was doing to these patients was wrong, but that he had no self-control.”

Despite confessing to these horrible and illegal actions, Mr. Wisner continued to be an employee of the VA for 37 more days, giving him enough time to beat the VA to the punch and seeking and receiving retirement on June 28, 2014.

One would think that the moment a VA employee admits to violating or abusing a patient, a client, or a coworker would be the moment their paycheck would end and they would no longer employed. There would be zero tolerance for such egregious conduct. 

Grounds for immediate termination clearly existed from Wisner’s own confessions, yet he was able to gather all of his personnel documents and submit his retirement paperwork to the VA to guarantee his retirement benefits – benefits, incidentally that millions of veterans continue to wait years and decades to receive.

There are so many factors about this situation that are troublesome, upsetting, disgusting. But most importantly, our veterans themselves are distraught. The VA failed to protect them from a sexual predator, they were taken advantage of, and they are hurting. One victim took his own life, troubled by what had happened to him.

Wisner’s termination void of retirement benefits would have maybe brought some small measure of justice to his victims. 

Despite having more than enough justification and the authority to fire Wisner, the VA chose to do nothing and that inaction sends a very strong and disappointing message not only to our veterans, but to the VA employees who are looking to the VA to have theirs, and the patients they care for, our veterans, best interests at heart.

They are expecting, our veterans are expecting the VA to live up to the “I CARE” values created by the secretary. Secretary McDonald announced the “I CARE” program; and I can tell you that veterans in Kansas would agree that the VA did not demonstrate Integrity, Commitment, Advocacy, Respect or Excellence in these circumstances.

When given the opportunity in a hearing and in writing, the VA’s top executives are unable to put at rest just my mind, but the minds of veterans back home in Kansas. 

Veterans deserve a heartfelt, a thorough examination, a thorough explanation, of what went wrong and what is now being done to make certain that it never happens again. 

Our local VA folks in our state have done what they can to reach out to veteran patients. The stories continue to grow, veterans continue to come forward. However, these serious and significant incidents require more than just outreach, they require more than just what can happen in Kansas, they require an engagement by the top leadership officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The VA’s refusal to admit fault or commit to remedying this situation gives little confidence to Congress and more importantly to veterans who are being asked to trust the department that failed to protect them.

It appears that secretary has forgotten his promise made over two years ago, to uphold the “seriousness of the moment,” to hold those responsible for bad behavior accountable.  

There could be no more serious moment of recklessness by the VA than the abuse of a veteran by its own employees.

###

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), member of the Senate Appropriations Health Subcommittee, issued the following statement regarding the Affordable Care Act (ACA) open enrollment period for health coverage, which begins today:

“The decision facing Kansas families today about their health care reflects one of the biggest problems with the Affordable Care Act: it fails to reduce health care costs. To offset the massive losses sustained under the ACA, health insurance providers in Kansas and across the country are being forced to raise their premium rates or exit the marketplace altogether. It’s a simple equation, but its consequences are severe and broad-reaching as premiums continue to climb by as much as 70 percent each year, making health care anything but affordable for Kansas consumers. The ACA should be repealed and replaced with true patient-centered reforms that will actually lower health costs for families.

“The morning after it passed Congress by a narrow, partisan vote more than six years ago, I introduced legislation to repeal the ACA. I also crafted a ten-point plan that would make improvements to address the cost and quality of health care including incentives for states to care for their unique populations, eliminate burdensome regulations, promote wellness and disease prevention, and give small businesses the power to offer health insurance at lower prices.”

Background

• Some Kansans will see their premiums jump by almost 50 percent. (KCUR)
• Since the ACA’s passage, the percentage of an average American household’s budget consumed by health care has increased by 21 percent according to the most recent figures. (Bureau of Labor Statistics)

###