Thomas Mott Osborne: “My district has 68 counties, 160,000 square miles. It is the third or fourth largest district in the United States. As a…”

“My district has 68 counties, 160,000 square miles. It is the third or fourth largest district in the United States. As a result, veterans who need health care must often travel several hours, sometimes hundreds of miles, to access VA health care. Sometimes this is as much as a 3-day trip, a day down, a day at the facility and a day back, and the problem is that usually transportation is very difficult to access. A person has to have a son or a daughter or a friend or somebody who can take off work for 2 days or 3 days to provide that transportation. So it is a tremendous hardship on a number of people. Often, all a veteran needs is to adjust medication, have a blood pressure test, receive an EKG or take a blood analysis. So these are very simple, routine matters that still take tremendous resources to have attended to. Routine medical care could be handled at the local hospital or clinic where that person resides or near where that individual resides, and this would require minimal travel time, minimal waiting time for an appointment because sometimes these appointments, you have a waiting time of 3, 4, 5, 6 months and also minimal expense.”