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product,” he said. “We have the most efficient work force in the world. So the goal should be preventive health care for every American.”
Webb continues to be alarmed that wages for typical wage earners have been stagnant, while medical costs have soared 72 percent. “What Americans are having to pay for medical is eating into their wages,” he said. “We’re moving towards a crisis.”
Another alarming episode was the famous breakdown of services for returning war veterans at Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, and the ensuing decision to shutter it in favor of new, more modem facilities at Fort Belvoir in southern Fairfax County.
“Fm a product of military medicine and in general, military medicine is very good medicine,” he said. “There really was a leadership failure in terms of putting these people on hold for a long period of time. They were lost in the process ... There are people who have really been wronged in their treatment.”
Webb said the Veterans Administration just got bogged down from the surge of military veterans needing medical care in the post-9/11 era and by Vietnam-era vets coming of age. “A lot of them are reaching the point of retirement from their basic career and they’re looking at the VA system as a fall-back,” he said. “The VA is getting hit from two different directions.”
The result was a backlog of some 600,000 claims, with fewer than 5,700 claims adjusters to handle them. “The number of claims adjudicators has gone up, but not by much,” he said. “The claims keep coming and so they keep falling behind ... Let’s get the assets to fix the problem.”
The build-out of Fort Belvoir under the Base Realignment and Closure Act (BRAC) may compound the problem, he said.
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