Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Veterans Affairs Secretary Anthony Principi said Wednesday that he may be forced to limit new enrollments to VA health care programs unless Congress requires some veterans to pay a $1,500 deductible.
Senators, at a hearing on the agency’s budget request for next year, sympathized with Principi’s funding problems but were united in criticizing the idea of the deductible. "I am very concerned that a $1,500 deductible will leave some veterans without any health care at all," said Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee in charge of the VA budget.
Principi, while acknowledging that the deductible is unpopular, said the agency’s financial problems were "getting to crisis proportions." He said the refusal of Congress to approve the plan would leave a $1.1 billion hole in the budget. In that case, he said, he would probably opt to reduce enrollment in health care programs rather than reduce quality of services.
Principi said he would request $142 million as part of an emergency spending package to make up part of a projected $400 million shortfall in VA revenues for the 2002 budget year that began Oct. 1. With that money, he said, he could probably get through 2002 without cutting enrollments.
Congress in 1996 passed a law opening VA medical facilities to nearly all veterans, not just the very poor and those with service-related disabilities who have always been the VA’s core patients.
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