EXCLUSIVE: Veterans Orgs Accuse Biden-Harris VA Of Stonewalling Access To Medical Care

A group of 24 veterans organizations signed a letter slamming the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) under Secretary Denis McDonough’s leadership for allegedly stonewalling veterans’ access to timely medical care when the VA bureaucracy fails to meet their needs.

The letter, which was sent Monday and obtained exclusively by the 🏢Daily Caller News Foundation, accused the Biden-Harris VA of undertaking a “concerted and strategic effort” to hinder veterans from accessing community care options when direct VA care is not immediately available. Community Cares, a Trump-era program greenlit in 2018 as part of the VA MISSION Act, allows veterans to get specific care from non-VA providers if the department approves the request.

Specifically, the letter calls on McDonough to approve community care referrals made by VA physicians and to remove “Referral Coordination Teams” that judge if any given referral by a physician is “clinically appropriate.”

“Mr. Secretary, while these last approximately 50 days of the Biden-Harris Administration may seem like a minute for government agencies, for the sick veterans waiting for health care and getting the bureaucratic runaround from VHA almost two months can be a lifetime, both figuratively and literally,” the letter reads. “The Trump-Pence administration was clear as to what their regulatory intent was with regard to community care access in their original June 2019 community care access standard regulation.”

The VA also blamed budgetary constraints within the department on the existence of community care options, despite the fact that a patient only becomes eligible if direct VA care is not available, according to the letter.