House Veterans’ Affairs Chairman Jeff Miller said Tuesday that if Hillary Clinton is elected president of the United States, proposals for reforming the Department of Veterans Affairs will “gather dust.”
“If Trump wins, I think you could see the Commission on Care report as a road map for VA reform. I think if Hillary Clinton is elected president, it’s going to sit on the shelf and gather dust,” Miller said, referring to a recently released 300-page report of suggestions to reform the department, Military Times reports.
Some of the suggestions from the report include restructuring the broken VA Choice Program, which was originally designed to give veterans an option to get the care they needed outside the VA system if doctors can’t see them in a reasonable time frame.
But critics, including Clinton, have said the proposal is a shadowy attempt to privatize the VA.
For Miller, the accusation of privatization couldn’t be more wrong.
“We know VA is not going to be capable, with the infrastructure that exists today or what can be built over the next decade, of handling the number of veterans needing to receive health care,” Miller said. “If VA wants to be providing quality care in a timely fashion to our veterans, they are going to need to look outside our current system.”
While Miller thinks Trump will take seriously the bipartisan recommendations in the Commission on Care report, he’s concerned Clinton will elect to ignore them.
Trump has issued a 10-point plan for transforming the VA, as currently the department is “part of the rigged system.”
“Fixing this corruption will be one of my many and highest priorities, and believe me, it will happen, I’m very good at things like that,” Trump said earlier in July.
Miller is an adviser to Donald Trump and is also thought to be vying for the position of VA Secretary in a Trump administration.
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