By NATHALIE LAVILLE
Observer staff
Oct. 11, 2007

In the most recent scuffle over funding for veterans, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) released a television advertisement this week calling on Congress to immediately approve the budget for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Nearly two weeks into the fiscal year, the budget is in a stalemate between the Democratic Congress and President Bush.

Patrick Campbell, legislative director of the IAVA, said the situation was alarming.

“The Department of Veteran Affairs is under-funded, under-staffed and under-budgeted,” he said. Campbell gave an example of disabled veterans who need to wait six months to get their benefits.

“And if their claim is rejected, they have to wait two more years,” he explained. He said beside doctors and nurses, mental health professionals were in demand. Army studies show 30 percent of soldiers are returning to the United States from Iraq with depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“They just didn’t plan on all these guys coming home and needing help,” Campbell said.

Reuters Photo
Iraq War veterans in front of Capitol Hill

According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, more than 200,000 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan have been treated at facilities run by the VA. That’s three times the number the VA expected. With 750,000 soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, VA funding is becoming an urgent question, Campbell said.

It’s not the first time Congress is running late in terms of funding, Joseph A. Violante, legislative director of the Disabled American Veterans, said at a congressional hearing earlier this month.

Disabled American Veterans is in partnership with Congress for a reform of the VA’s heath care budget. Violante urged the Committee on Veterans Affairs to agree with Congress on a budget reform “that results in sufficiency, predictability and timeliness of VA health care funding,” he said. The fact that the VA budget has to be set by Congress every year goes against these three goals, Violante said.

Congress must “find a long term funding solution that guarantees all enrolled veterans will have a dependable VA system, not just today when the war is news, but far in the future,” he said. Violante said the way to achieve that goal was with mandatory funding, which means that the budget would be fixed by a law, and Congress could review it periodically. Mandatory funding would provide the VA with better visibility for its programs, he said.

Some members of Committee questioned how to find the money to fund the VA through a mandatory procurement. But Texas Democrat Ciro D. Rodriguez said providing funding so that veterans could get health care and social services is the least Congress could do.

With a budget of $77 billion, the Department of Veterans Affairs treats more than five million veterans annually at its hospitals and treatment centers. Created in 1979 to help Vietnam War veterans readjust to society, these centers provide combat-stress counseling and medical referrals, in addition to job counseling and marriage therapy. The number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who visited the centers more than doubled between 2004 and 2006, according to VA records.