Doug Bereuter: “this member rises today in strong support of the Hinchey/Frelinghuysen amendment which would prohibit funds in the bill…”

“this member rises today in strong support of the Hinchey/Frelinghuysen amendment which would prohibit funds in the bill from being used by the Department of Veterans Affairs to implement or administer the Veterans Equitable Resource Allocation (VERA) system. From the time the Administration announced this new system, this Member has voiced his strong opposition to VERA and has supported funding levels of the VA Health Administration above the amount the President recommended. The new VERA system has had a very negative impact on Nebraska and other sparsely populated areas of the country. The VERA plan provides the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical care funding to regions across the country and employs an allocation formula that ties funding for each of the 22 geographic regions to the numbers of veterans they actually serve. While the VERA formula produced a very modest one percent increase in funding for this fiscal year, last year the VERA formula produced a 5 percent decrease, which resulted in $13.5 million less funding distributed to VA programs in my state of Nebraska, resulting in the fact that Nebraska is still receiving significantly less veterans funding than it did only two years ago. All members of Congress should agree, Mr. Chairman, that the VA must provide adequate facilities for veterans all across the country regardless of whether they live in sparsely populated areas with resultant low usage numbers for VA hospitals.”