Sen. Cruz: We Can Improve the VA by Empowering Our Veterans With Choice

HOUSTON, Texas - U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) today participated in the final of a series of ‘Defend & Reform' town halls with Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) in Houston. There, along with Director of Policy Dan Caldwell, Sen. Cruz discussed his efforts on behalf of veterans, including implementing VA accountability, expanding veteran choice and modernizing the VA's IT infrastructure.

The town hall in its entirety may be viewed here. Still photos of the event may be viewed here.

One audience member asked how the quality of the VA system deteriorated so badly, and why it requires so much oversight to care for our nation's veterans: "Senator first, thank you for always putting vets first throughout your time in the Senate and on your campaign. My question is this, prior to the signing of the current VA accountability act that the president just signed, what took place that got us so far that we would need something like this to actually care for our veterans and hold the VA accountable and their employees accountable?"

Sen. Cruz responded, "Let me say thank you for your service. And to every one of you here who are veterans I want to say thank you for standing up and sacrificing and stepping forward to risk everything for our country. We are grateful and that's really one of the central purposes of these town halls is to have the opportunity to say ‘thank you.' You asked ‘how did we get where we are with the VA?' Some of it is inherent in the nature of a government bureaucracy and it's the reason why I focus so much on choice. Because I'm trying to look at structural solutions that will change the incentives within a system. And I am a passionate believer in competition. That competition works. That competition improves quality.

Sen. Cruz continued, "So for example, all of us, think of the U.S. Post Office. And what happened to quality when FedEx and UPS began competing vigorously with the U.S. Post Office? Suddenly we started seeing a lot better quality, a lot better service from the Post Office, because they no longer had a monopoly, they had real competition. And so if they didn't do their job, they'd lose their customers to their competitors.

Sen. Cruz continued, "You know another example of that we saw, a lot of us are old enough to remember cars in the 1970s, cars in the 1980s - American cars, where quality wasn't where it should be. Quality had really gone down, they guzzled a lot of gas, and they broke down too much. And we remember when Japanese cars started being sold. And that was a big deal that caused a lot of people to be very, very upset about the onslaught of Japanese cars. But the impact, as Japanese cars came in, that competition and people were freaking out that the American car industry is going to go away, dramatically improved the quality of American cars. We saw in the face of competition, American car companies going back and saying, ‘okay we got to produce a better car, we got to produce a more reliable car. We got to produce a car that Americans want to buy, or we're going to lose our customers. Now focus on the VA. One of the fundamental causes of the challenges there, is that many of their customers, many of their patients are captive. They don't have another alternative. And so the power of expanding choice, is it gives you the veteran, you the patient power. So if you show up and you're told, ‘Okay this treatment you're going to have a waiting list of 30 days, or 60 days or 90 days,' you know what if you have choice you can say ‘To heck with that. I'm going somewhere else.' And so you don't actually need Washington dictating ‘okay don't give this lousy waiting period,' because empowering customers gives the power of competition to improve the system. I think that's the only thing structurally, that will change the incentives is when veterans have the power of choice themselves."

When asked about mental health of veterans and how it relates to homelessness by an audience member, Sen. Cruz recalled his recent visits with two Houston veteran facilities, and emphasized the need to provide better care for veterans struggling with the unseen wounds of war.

"Mental health has been an issue with our vets and it's almost a direct correlation, as far as homelessness. What are your solutions to combat the high rate of homelessness for our vets?" asked an audience member.

Sen. Cruz responded, "Thank you for that question and you're right, it is an enormously important question. You look at mental health issues, you look at homelessness you look at suicides, where we've got 22 veteran suicides a day. It's heartbreaking. Yesterday morning, I had the opportunity to go out and visit Camp Hope, here in northwest Houston which is a facility if y'all are not familiar with it. It's a wonderful facility that cares for vets struggling with PTSD. It's a residential facility. They have about 60 vets that are staying there on the campus. It's a Christian ministry that helps them work through the challenges, helps them work through their issues. And I spent a couple hours just sitting and visiting and hearing their stories one veteran after another who a number of them had been homeless. Virtually all of them had significant drug or alcohol dependencies. Had been enmeshed in very dangerous situations. A number of veterans around the table had suicide attempts and in several instances, multiple suicide attempts in the past. And it was heartbreaking and I will say we as a society need to do a far better job of responding to the ravages of warfare. The physical ravages, yes. But the mental, and spiritual ravages. Of listening to these veterans yesterday morning express the guilt and self-doubt. I remember one individual who had put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, and the bullet had grazed off and not killed him. And he described how one of the other vets at the camp had asked him, ‘what did your son ever do to make you so unhappy with him?' and he was very confused. His son was 6, and he said ‘why would you leave your son with the agony of not having a dad?' and he was just describing and he was tearing up as he was describing, ‘I never thought of it from that perspective.' And the impact of you know what they describe that was so impactful, was just being with other soldiers, and sailors and airmen and marines and discovering that what they thought was their own private agony, there were others going through the very same thing.

Sen. Cruz concluded, "I think part of dealing with mental health is being honest and direct in confronting it and part of it is the overall structural reform that we've been talking about here today about making the VA more responsive, by making it have to be competitive with vets being empowered to choose."

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