Shalala, Dole Visit Veterans in Miami

MIAMI _ Veterans told University of Miami President Donna Shalala and former U.S. Senator Robert Dole they were getting “first class medical care” from Miami’s Veteran’s Administration system.

But “it’s the aftercare that they were struggling with, their eligibility for certain benefits,” Shalala said Monday, after her first meeting with veterans since she and Dole were appointed by President Bush this month to lead a commission on healthcare for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Monday’s closed-door, 90-minute meeting with about a dozen veterans was an unofficial kickoff for the commission, appointed after The Washington Post revealed poor care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, considered the nation’s top veterans hospital.

Dole was in Miami to give a speech to a private group on Sunday so Shalala asked him to stick around to meet with veterans and tour the U.S. Army Trauma Training Center facility at UM/Jackson Memorial Hospital. A VA spokeswoman said the patients who met with Dole and Shalala _ most of whom receive outpatient care _ were chosen at random.

“They were very articulate and very clear and very protective of the quality of medicine they had received,” Shalala said.

Said Dole: “It’s this transition. When do I get my first check if I’ve got three kids at home and a wife and no income? Should I wait 137 days, which is the average? No.”

Shalala said one of the veterans she met with Monday was told he could not finish his engineering degree at the University of Miami because the government did not want to pay the tuition at the private school.

“The reason for that, of course, is someone’s trying to save money in the system,” she said.

The full nine-member commission convenes April 13 to map out plans for meeting veterans and touring VA hospitals throughout the country in time to meet a June 30 deadline. The panel will also establish a Web site so soldiers and veterans can comment without fear of retribution.

Dole, who was wounded in World War II, was treated at a military facility in Miami Beach when he returned from service in the 1940s. He has since visited veterans hospitals around the country, ordering a report on military healthcare before he left the U.S. Senate in 1996. Some recommendations from that report and a subsequent report in 2002 have gone unheeded, he said.

“There are so many commissions, I think there are 800 commissions now in government, and neither one of us wants to just be on a commission where they spend a lot of your time and do a lot of work and they put it on a shelf and that’s the end of it,” Dole said.

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