Stuck On Hold Act
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Sen. Kennedy, John [R-LA]
ID: K000393
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Bill Summary
Joy, another congressional bill that's about as effective as a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. Let's dissect this farce, shall we?
**Main Purpose & Objectives:** The Stuck On Hold Act (S 3170) is a masterclass in legislative theater. Its primary objective is to make it seem like Congress cares about the plight of veterans stuck on hold with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). In reality, this bill is a shallow attempt to placate voters and distract from the VA's systemic failures.
**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** The bill requires the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to implement an automated system with callback functionality for customer service telephone lines within one year. Because, you know, that's exactly what's been holding back the VA from providing decent service – a lack of automation. The bill also mandates guidance on reducing wait times to 10 minutes or less. Wow, I bet the VA is shaking in its boots.
**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** Veterans, who will likely remain stuck on hold despite this bill's empty promises. The VA, which will get to pretend it's doing something about its abysmal customer service. And, of course, the politicians sponsoring this bill, who'll get to tout their "support for veterans" in campaign ads.
**Potential Impact & Implications:** This bill is a placebo, folks. It won't address the root causes of the VA's problems – bureaucratic inefficiency, lack of funding, and poor management. Instead, it'll create a new layer of bureaucracy to implement the automated system, which will likely be plagued by technical issues and ineptitude.
In short, this bill is a Band-Aid on a festering wound. It's a symptom of a deeper disease: Congress's inability to tackle real problems due to cowardice, incompetence, or both. The Stuck On Hold Act is a prime example of legislative malpractice – a shallow attempt to treat the symptoms rather than the underlying illness.
Diagnosis: Legislative Theater Syndrome (LTS) – a chronic condition characterized by empty promises, bureaucratic posturing, and a complete disregard for actual problem-solving.
Prognosis: Poor. This bill will likely pass with great fanfare, only to be forgotten in the annals of congressional history as another failed attempt to address the VA's systemic issues. Meanwhile, veterans will continue to suffer from subpar service, and politicians will keep pretending they care.
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đź’° Campaign Finance Network
Sen. Kennedy, John [R-LA]
Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle
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Project 2025 Policy Matches
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document. Higher similarity scores indicate stronger thematic connections.
Introduction
— 647 — Department of Veterans Affairs reimagine the health care footprint in some locales, and spur a realignment of capacity through budgetary allocations. Specifically: 1. Embrace the expansion of Community Based Outpatient Clinics (CBOCs) as an avenue to maintain a VA footprint in challenging medical markets without investing further in obsolete and unaffordable VA health care campuses. 2. Explore the potential to pilot facility-sharing partnerships between the VA and strained local health care systems to reduce costs by leveraging limited talent and resources. Personnel l Extend the term of the Under Secretary for Health (USH) to five years. Additionally, authority should be given to reappoint this individual for a second five-year term both to allow for continuity and to protect the USH from political transition. l Establish a Senior Executive Service (SES) position of VHA Care System Chief Information Officer (CIO), selected by and reporting to the chief of the VHA Care System with a dotted line to the VA CIO. l Identify a workflow process to bring wait times in compliance with VA MISSION Act–required time frames wherever possible. 1. Assess the daily clinical appointment load for physicians and clinical staff in medical facilities where wait times for care are well outside of the time frames required by the VA MISSION Act. 2. Require VHA facilities to increase the number of patients seen each day to equal the number seen by DOD medical facilities: approximately 19 patients per provider per day. Currently, VA facilities may be seeing as few as six patients per provider per day. 3. Consider a pilot program to extend weekday appointment hours and offer Saturday appointment options to veterans if a facility continues to demonstrate that it has excess capacity and is experiencing delays in the delivery of care for veterans. 4. Identify clinical services that are consistently in high demand but require cost-prohibitive compensation to recruit and retain talent, and examine exceptions for higher competitive pay. — 648 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise 5. Assess the medical facilities where Community Care is readily available but referrals for Community Care are below the averages in other similar markets, referrals expiring are above the average, and/ or canceled appointments are above the average. Identify reasons and factors and consider possible ways to improve timeliness and responsiveness for veterans. 6. Further explore how to leverage telehealth to reduce personnel costs across the enterprise and serve veterans. Continue to pursue expansion of broadband services to remote and rural areas. 7. Assess recruitment and retention in highly competitive medical markets to identify common limiting factors for attracting high-demand, specialized occupations. 8. Consider aggressively recruiting retired physicians who desire to serve veterans. 9. Consider expanding VA tuition assistance in exchange for reciprocal service in rural or understaffed VAMCs. 10. Examine the surpluses or deficits in mental health professionals throughout the enterprise, recognizing that the department needs a blend of social workers, therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists with a focus on attracting high-quality talent. l Conduct a high-priority assessment of Electronic Health Record (EHR) transition delays and functionality problems. VA innovation in health care for the next 20 years and beyond will rest squarely on the timely implementation of the new VHA EHR in coordination with the DOD’s parallel pacing effort. The VA’s EHR rollout has been blocked by technical delays at local facilities where personnel have raised safety concerns and infrastructure has not been modernized to accept the new system. VETERANS BENEFITS ADMINISTRATION (VBA) Needed Reforms The most evident and ongoing concern is the complexity of benefits, which can lead to confusion for the veteran and, if not mitigated early in the veteran’s interactions, long-term distrust of and animosity toward the VA. Wholesale ben- efits reform is unnecessary and politically a “third rail,” but effective managerial
Introduction
— 644 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise In sum, the VA for the foreseeable future will experience significant fiscal, human capital, and infrastructure crosswinds and risks. Budgets are at historic highs, and with a workforce now above 400,000, the VA is contending with a lack of new veteran enrollees to offset the declining population of older veterans. Recruitment of medical and benefits personnel has become more challenging. Veterans are migrating from the northern states to the southern and western states for retirement and employment. Meanwhile, VA information technol- ogy (IT) is struggling to keep pace with the evolution of patient care and record keeping. Consequently, VA leaders in the next Administration must be wise and courageous political strategists, experienced managers to run day-to-day oper- ations more effectively, innovators to address the changing veteran landscape, and agile “fixers” to mitigate and repair systemic problems created or ignored by the present leadership team. VETERANS HEALTH ADMINISTRATION (VHA) Needed Reforms l Rescind all departmental clinical policy directives that are contrary to principles of conservative governance starting with abortion services and gender reassignment surgery. Neither aligns with service-connected conditions that would warrant VA’s providing this type of clinical care, and both follow the Left’s pernicious trend of abusing the role of government to further its own agenda. l Focus on the effects of shifting veteran demographics. At least during the next decade, the VA will experience a significant generational shift in its overall patient population. Of the approximately 18 million veterans alive today, roughly 9.1 million are enrolled for VA health care, and 6.4 million of these enrollees use VA health care consistently. These 6.4 million veterans are split almost evenly between those who are over age 65 and those who are under age 65, but the share of VA’s health care dollars is spent predominantly in the over-65 cohort. That share increases significantly as veterans live longer and use the VHA system at a higher rate. VHA enrollments of new users are increasingly at risk of being exceeded by the deaths of current enrollees, primarily because significant numbers of the Vietnam generation are reaching their life expectancy. The generational transition from Vietnam-era veterans to post-9/11 veterans will take several years to complete. The ongoing demographic transition is a catalyst for needed assessments of how the VA can improve the delivery of care to a numerically declining and differently dispersed national population — 645 — Department of Veterans Affairs of veterans—a population that is more active, reaching middle age or retirement age, and migrating for lifestyle and career reasons. At the center of the VHA’s evolution during this generational transition is an ongoing tension, some of it politically contrived, between Direct Care for Veterans provided from inside the VHA system and Community Care for Veterans who are referred to private providers participating in the VHA’s two Community Care Networks (CCNs). In recent years, the budget for Community Care has grown as demand from veterans has risen sharply, sometimes outpacing the budgets for Community Care at individual VAMCs. The Trump Administration made Community Care part of its “Veteran- centric” approach to ensure that veterans would be able to participate more fully in their health care decisions and have options if or when the VHA was unable to meet their needs. The Biden Administration has watered down that effort, has sought various procedural ways to slow the rate of referrals to private doctors, and at some facilities is reportedly manipulating the Community Care access standards required by the VA MISSION Act of 2018. If the makeup of Congress is favorable in 2025, the next Administration should rapidly and explicitly codify VA MISSION Act access standards in legislation to prevent the VA from avoiding or watering down the requirements in the future. First and foremost, a veterans bill of rights is needed so that veterans and VA staff know exactly what benefits veterans are entitled to receive, with a clear process for the adjudication of disputes, and so that staff ensure that all veterans are informed of their eligibility for Community Care. Currently, veterans are not routinely and consistently told that they are eligible for Community Care unless they request information or are given a referral. l To strengthen Community Care, the next Administration should create new Secretarial directives to implement the VA MISSION Act properly. Sections for consideration and areas for reform include the following: 1. Sections 101 and 103 (Community Care eligibility for access standards and the best medical interest of the veteran). 2. Section 104 (Community Care access standards and standards for quality of care).
Introduction
— 643 — Department of Veterans Affairs with a growth in same-day surgical procedures and outpatient care, so has the VA, and in 2018 Congress added access to private-sector urgent care outlets as one of the VA’s health care benefits. Today, the VA operates 172 inpatient VA Medical Centers (VAMCs), which are an average of 60 years old, and 1,113 Community Based Outpatient Clinics (CBOCs), which are newer facilities designed to meet the needs of veterans closer to home. The VA also manages a Community Care Network (CCN) through contracts with Optum and TriWest, third-party health care administrators responsible for build- ing and maintaining a robust population of community providers to meet the needs of veterans referred for care outside of the VA system. Currently, approximately 6.4 million veterans out of 18 million nationally (and out of the 9.1 million who are enrolled) use the VA for health care; the remainder use employer-sponsored plans, Tricare, Medicare, and Medicaid. The disability benefits system evolved significantly in the years between the Cold War era and the global war on terrorism, a period when the VA enrolled large numbers of veterans from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam who were seeking disability benefits and health care. Disability compensation is the largest VA benefit, but there also are dozens of others, the next largest of which are the GI Bill and the Home Loan Guaranty. These benefits are administered through 56 Regional Benefits Offices (RBOs) and hundreds of satellite sites around the country. The Agent Orange Act of 19914 significantly expanded the scope of disability ben- efits for those who had deployed to Vietnam, and the cost of those benefits began to increase dramatically as the Vietnam generation of veterans aged and began to expe- rience adverse health conditions, some of which were presumed to have been caused by defoliant chemicals used in Southeast Asia. In 2016 and 2017, a burdensome backlog of appeals of denied disability claims from multiple wartime generations—a backlog numbering in the hundreds of thousands—led to a joint effort by the VA, Vet- eran Service Organizations (VSOs), and Congress to pass legislation that streamlined appeal processes. Implemented in 2017, this historic “good governance” success has helped the VA to reduce the number of these appeals dramatically. The Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring Our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act of 20225 addressed adverse health outcomes presumed to be the result of veterans’ exposure to airborne toxins during the global war on terrorism and further expanded disability benefits to the most recent gen- eration of veterans. These ambitious authorities, like the 1991 authorities, have the potential to overwhelm the VA’s ability to process new disability claims and adjudicate appeals. Currently, the VA is seeking to hire large numbers of personnel to process these claims while exploring the use of an automated process to accel- erate claims reviews and decisions. The ever-present lag in the hiring and training of new employees could result in major problems with the timely adjudication of benefits well into the next Administration in 2025.
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About These Correlations
Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.