HARLINGEN — The head of Veterans Affairs visited the VA hospital here Thursday, updating the status of the new PACT Act for veterans suffering respiratory issues linked to service as well as to praise local VA officials for improvements at the Harlingen facility.
Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough told reporters at VA Texas Valley Healthcare System the PACT Act, passed in August, that any veterans who served in the Middle East or Africa or elsewhere who may be suffering potentially service-linked respiratory issues to contact the VA to file a claim.
“First of all, I want to just say as clearly as I can to any veteran who served in Central Command, Iraq, Afghanistan, all the way from Somalia in the southwest to Uzbekistan in the northeast over these 30 years of war, please file your claim,” McDonough said. “If you have questions how to do it, contact us at 1-800-MYVA411 or visit us at va.gov.
The day after the PACT Act was signed into law on Aug. 11, veterans set an all-time record for filing online disability compensation claims. Veterans have now filed more than 200,000 total claims.
But there have been complaints about the process being slow, with a large backlog of PACT Act claims.
“We are processing claims more quickly now than at any time in the VBA’s (Veterans Benefit Administration) history, that’s one,” McDonough said. “Two, our backlog is down to about 150,000 claims, that’s down from a high of 260,000.
“One of the reason it’s down and one of the reasons I’m confident when we will be ableto address those claims in January when we begin processing them, is that we hired about 2,000 additional people at VBA. They’re now trained, in the chair, making a determination.”
Just five years ago, the VA medical facility in Harlingen was one of the lowest-rated facilities in the system. Of nearly 150 VA medical centers in the country, it was among 15 facilities with the lowest possible ranking.
Today, McDonough said, it is one of the highest-ranked facilities in the VA system.
“One of our highest impact, highest-performing facilities in the whole system,” he said. “Whether it’s the annual employee survey, where Harlingen health care center scores highest in the entire enterprise … or whether it’s trust scores for male and female vets, above 90 percent, and I will say importantly that this is the first facility that I visited since I’ve become secretary where the trust scores for female veterans are higher than for males veterans, which I think speaks to the culture and the climate that the team have built here in Harlingen.”
McDonough also said the Harlingen facility intends to reach out to veterans unable to make the trip into the city for care.
“Not only that, not only do they give great care for veterans who come through, they also take the goodness they have developed here and are moving it to veterans in rural communities,” McDonough said. “In November, we expect to start weekly mobile medical units throughout the Valley, throughout southern Texas, to get to veterans who are already enrolled with us but are not accessing care because of the long distance they need to travel.”
McDonough was accompanied Thursday by U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, who he praised for his support of the PACT Act.
“We’re so honored to have Secretary McDonough here visiting our veterans facilities and seeing some of the accomplishments that we’ve been able to make with the resources that have come down from this administration down to our region, and also having conversations on how we can continue to expand and give more care to our veterans here in the region and our rural areas all across South Texas,” Gonzalez said.
