The House Veterans' Affairs Committee is making plans to prevent veteran's healthcare funding from being interrupted due to the usual year's end bipartisan wrangling over the budget.
On Thursday Bob Filner D-Calif. chairman of the committee, introduced the Veterans Health Care Budget Reform Act, H.R. 6939, a bill to provide the Veterans Administration(VA) healthcare with funding a year in advance. A Senate version of the bill was introduced Friday by Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee Chairman Daniel Akaka (D-Ha.).
According to Filner, over the past six years the VA has not received its final budget until more than three months after the start of the fiscal year, which resulted not only in delays in planned expansions of care for veterans, but also challenged the VA to efficiently manage the system.
Filner called the legislation, "a historic new approach to guarantee that veterans have access to the comprehensive, quality healthcare they deserve and have earned."
"For too many years, the VA has had to make do with insufficient budgets resulting in restricted access for many veterans," Filner said. "When funding is short, it is our veterans who pay the price."
Filner said the bill's provision for an advance appropriation does not create concerns about violating the current pay-go policy in Congress, and VA healthcare funding would remain discretionary, Filner said.
In addition, an advance appropriation would give the VA more time to plan how to deliver the most efficient care to an increasing number of veterans with increasingly complex medical conditions, Filner added.
"There is no question that we've made great strides towards correcting these funding problems during the past two years," said Filner. "However, this new legislation offers us a historic opportunity to permanently reform the VA health care budget process in a commonsense way to help ensure that future generations never again face these kinds of problems."
The bill would also task the Governmental Accountability Office (GAO) with studying and reporting to Congress for the next three years on the VA's budget forecasting model and estimates.