Jeff Miller Interferes on Commission on Care

The VA Commission on Care, the 15-member bipartisan body created by Congress to make recommendations about the future of the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), has been meeting for months and plans to publish its findings in June. Until this week, Congress had not interfered with the commission’s supposedly independent deliberations.

That all changed on March 14 when Republican Congressman Jeff Miller, the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee chairman and a staunch advocate of privatizing the Veterans Health Administration, wrote an angry letter to the commission chairwoman Nancy Schlichting. In this unprecedented missive, Miller personally attacked Phillip Longman, a commission member who has advocated not only preserving but strengthening the veterans’ health-care agency in part by eliminating its cumbersome eligibility requirements, and expanding health-care services to veterans’ families.

Miller accused Longman, a Washington Monthly senior editor and author of a sympathetic appraisal of the VHA, Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care is Better than Yours, of personally editing a recent article by former Wall Street Journal reporter Alicia Mundy. Mundy criticized Miller for his singular focus on VHA wait times and his insistence that 40 veterans had died because they were waiting for care. She also detailed the role that Miller and other congressional conservatives have played in the Koch brothers’ campaign to privatize veterans’ health care. Mundy warned that private hospital systems, which have representatives on the commission, are “circling like vultures over the idea of dividing up the VA’s multibillion-dollar budget.”

Miller said Longman helped spread “blatantly false propaganda in an attempt to minimize the wait-times scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs” through the Mundy magazine article. Longman “either believes the article’s false claims or he—as an editor of the piece—signed off on them knowing they were untrue,” Miller wrote. He warned the commissioners “to take anything Longman says with an extremely large grain of salt.”

A subsequent Washington Monthly blog post by Paul Glastris, who actually edited Mundy’s article, rebutted Miller’s claims about patient deaths and other issues.  Longman, who is a part-time staff member at the magazine, also reviewed Mundy’s piece but did not edit it. (However, members on the commission, which includes health-care industry executives, veterans’ advocates, and a representative of the Koch brothers-backed Concerned Veterans for America, can continue to perform their professional duties as long as they do not claim to be acting on behalf of or speaking for the commission.)

Veterans advocates say that Miller’s tirade was the first time any of them could remember a congressman attacking a commission member.

Retired Army captain Steve Robertson, a former Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee staff director, told The American Prospect that, in his 30 years working on veterans issues, he couldn’t “recall a member of Congress ever instructing members of a commission or advisory group to ignore one of their members.” Robertson said, “Miller is way out of line.” Another representative of a major veterans service organization who did not wish to be identified, called Miller’s letter an attempt to “intimidate an independent commission and politicize their recommendations”

One week later, Miller appeared before the commission and continued his critique of the agency. In his hour-long comments, Miller had nothing good to say about the VHA. He ignored the findings of an independent assessment commissioned by Congress that found that the VHA delivers care that is often superior to the private sector. When commission member Michael Blecker of San Francisco-based Swords to Plowshares tried to defend the VHA’s model of integrated care and worried that many veterans would fall through the cracks of a private health-care system, Miller barely let Blecker finish his comments. The congressman argued that the VHA is “holding veterans inside” the system and must allow them to move into private sector care. Miller concluded by encouraging the commission to offer “bold ideas” on overhauling the system in their upcoming report.

The congressman may want to “empower veterans,” as he terms it. But moving them into a private health-care sector that has primary care physician shortages, coordination of care difficulties, serious wait-time challenges, and hundreds of thousands of deaths due to preventable medical errors poses risks that the commission can ill-afford to ignore.