U.S. Rep. Bradley Byrne, R-Fairhope, called on Veterans Affairs Secretary Bob McDonald to resign Tuesday over the secretary's comparison of long waits at VA hospitals to long lines at Disneyland and what Byrne viewed as the agency's failure to correct systemic problems at VA facilities.
"Just this past weekend at an Armed Forces Day event in Mobile, I heard from over 50 veterans who are having issues with the VA. Then, just a few days later, I hear that Secretary McDonald compared these heartbreaking complaints to families waiting in line at Disneyland. It makes my blood boil," Byrne said in a statement. "This comment just further illustrates why things aren't getting better at the VA. Secretary McDonald should resign, and the president should start looking for a VA secretary who adequately understands the challenges facing our veterans. The next VA secretary should also appreciate the need to increase veteran access to private medical care instead of forcing veterans to remain stuck in the failed VA bureaucracy."
McDonald stirred controversy Monday when he said the agency's effectiveness should not be measured by wait times alone. In 2014, McDonald replaced former VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, who resigned in the wake of a scandal at the agency that showed VA officials covered up long wait lines at VA facilities. Many veterans waited at least two weeks for VA appointments.
"The days to an appointment [are] really not what we should be measuring. What we should be measuring is the veteran's satisfaction," McDonald said Monday during a media breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, the Hill reported. "When you go to Disney, do they measure the number of hours you wait in line? What's important is: What's your satisfaction with the experience. And that's really the kind of measure I want to move to."
The VA doesn't report data on wait times, and McDonald said he was reluctant to published additional data points because he said it would distract from "what's really important."
"So why don't I also make the measurement of the fit of your prosthetic sleeve public?" McDonald said, according to USA Today. "I mean, I've got so many measures, if I make them all public, you're all going to write headlines about them and they're going to distract people from what's important. I don't want to do that. I want people focused on what's really important."
Rep. Martha Roby, R-Montgomery, arguably the harshest critic of the VA among Alabama's House delegation, isn't calling for McDonald's resignation. But she said his comments, particularly on McDonald's hesitancy to release additional data, further fueled the need for Congress to pass her bill requiring the VA to publicly publish performance data each quarter. The VA Medical Center Recovery Act passed the House in February and has yet to be voted on in the Senate.
"For him to say, 'You just don't understand our data and our metrics, you would take it out of context,' well, that's the problem with the VA in the first place," Roby said, adding that she wasn't surprised McDonald said he didn't want the data being made public.
"Unfortunately we're just seeing more of the same," the congresswoman said. "The VA doesn't want the American people to have access to this information for obvious reasons -- because we haven't seen improvement in the VA like we would expect, particularly when Congress is breathing down the VA's neck to improve on the wait times and access to care for our veterans."