Veterans Health Care

Floor Speech

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I very much appreciate the efforts of Senator McCain and Senator Sanders to get the VA health care bill through the Senate. However, I was somewhat disappointed with how abrupt and abbreviated the amendment process was; to wit, there was none. As a result, I think some very good amendments never had a chance to be considered. One of those amendments was mine, and I would like to discuss it briefly because I think it is something the Senate should pursue.

I will note that everybody I spoke to about it--Republicans and Democrats alike--liked the amendment and thought it made sense. So I will describe it.

A little background: Some time ago, as we entered the computer age, we figured out that there were better ways to maintain health records than in cardboard file folders stuffed away in file drawers. One of the leaders in solving that problem--lost information buried in file folders--was the Veterans' Administration. They developed one of the best electronic health records in the country. For years they were leaders in the technology of electronic health records. To this day, the VA electronic health record system is one of which they can be proud.

It has one flaw, and that flaw is that it is limited to Veterans' Administration medical facilities and Veterans' Administration medical providers. If a veteran in Rhode Island is walking through Providence and trying to cross the plaza in Kennedy Square and gets hit by a vehicle and rushed to the Rhode Island Hospital emergency room, the Rhode Island Hospital emergency room has no access to that veteran's electronic health record.

At the same time a number of States have really stepped up not only to have electronic health records but to have a hub that exchanges the information in an electronic health record. So when you go to get an MRI or go to see a specialist or are taken to an emergency room or have a lab test, the results of that encounter are loaded automatically into your electronic health record. That can only work if you have the whole system pulling together, and some States are doing that.

Now you have the difficult situation where there are States that are building an information network for health records and the Veterans' Administration, which has one of the best electronic health records in the country, is not participating in that local effort to tie the medical system together for the benefit of local folks. That is an oversight that needs to be corrected, and my amendment would encourage and support the Veterans' Administration in taking its electronic health records and connecting them to the information exchanges that are growing.

In Rhode Island it is called Current Care. It is run by the Rhode Island Quality Institute. It does a phenomenal job. We are reaching out to veterans to do it voluntarily, but it has been a real chore to work with the Veterans' Administration to move this along. It has taken an enormous amount of time despite the goodwill of the people involved. There has not been much in the way of resources available. We have had to go to private and nonprofit and charitable sources to try to fund this. That doesn't make sense.

This bill is particularly important--where we are providing more out-of-network access for veterans and more ability for veterans to go to doctors that will not be in the electronic health network record--because it would allow the very good electronic health record of the Veterans' Administration to connect with these emerging electronic health records information networks. It is simply leaving veterans behind to leave them out under these circumstances.

I hope I will have a chance to move this legislation on some other vehicle, but I have to say, as important as this bill was, it was disappointing that a piece of legislation as simple as mine--an amendment that would have enjoyed extraordinary bipartisan support and probably would have been agreed to on a voice vote--never had a chance to see the light of day because, as I said, of the abbreviation and abruptness, to put it mildly, of the amendment process.

I yield the floor.

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