Setting their sites.

Millennium Act targets veterans' long term care

FEDERAL LAWMAKERS ARE TAKING AIM AT AN ailing veterans' health care system with ambitious plans for reform.

Authors of the Veterans' Millennium Health Care Act plan to target long term care, which has become as important as acute care to many World War II veterans, says Veterans' Affairs Health Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.).

The Act would mandate operation and maintenance of a national program of extended care services including both VA-run and contract nursing home care. The VA also would be required to develop a plan to expand both home and community-based care options by January 1, 2000.

The Millennium Act would provide the VA with "important new tools to improve veterans' access to long term care," says Steams. He made his remarks during a series of May congressional hearings considering the act.

According to General Accounting Office testimony, one of every four VA medical care dollars is spent maintaining buildings rather than caring for patients. In some cases, Steams testified, dosing VA hospitals might be appropriate. The bill would require the VA to reinvest savings in a new, improved treatment facility or services in the area if it stops operating a hospital.

Dan Amon, spokesman for the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, says proponents hope the Millennium Act will go through full committee hearings and conference committee hearings promptly, with passage by the full Senate before the August recess.

Also on the table in federal committees this summer is a healthy dose of funding for VA health services. Initially, in January, President Clinton requested a budget of $18.1 billion for VA health. "The VA community saw this budget as inadequate in the atmosphere of an aging population," says Amon. The Senate-House Conference Committee raised that figure by $1.7 billion, an "extraordinary" increase, according to Amon. Proponents hope that the final figure reported out of the Appropriations Committee--the check writers of Congress--this summer will be close to $19.8 billion.