"It is time for our nation to develop and sustain a strategic, comprehensive, and statutorily mandated overhaul of many of the negligent structures of our care for veterans and their families."
Larry Smith
October 16, 2007
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington Town Hall Meeting
Morris Frock American Legion, Hagerstown, Maryland
Larry Smith is a third generation veteran of the US military. He is the recipient of a Citation from the Maryland Department of Disabled American Veterans and is also the recipient of the True American Award by the National Order of Trench Rats. He has developed and coordinated community service activities to support relief agencies such as the Interfaith Service Coalition and the Human Resources Development Commission in identifying the challenges of sectors of our homeless populations. It is a moral national tragedy that nearly 25% of our homeless population is comprised of veterans. Our national leaders have presented rhetoric without substance for decades
Larry Smith will fight to reverse the current reality that many veterans and their families experience every day by sponsoring the US Veterans Compact.
Larry Smith's proposal will fight to secure the following:
1) Development of a national advisory board comprised of members selected equally from the legislative and executive branches from members of veteran's organizations that will be free from the bureaucratic red tape of our current department of veterans' affairs. This board will have unfettered access to veterans health care facilities, will have capacity to meet with veterans and their families, and report to congressional oversight committees inadequacies and violations of nationally prescribed standards of care.
2) Development of mandatory standards of care by all veterans health care facilities with a single point of contact for veterans and their families of individuals that will oversee the individual cases of veterans and their families, integrate and utilize effective medical technological information systems, provide a, "Veterans and Family Quality Focus", continuous quality process and improvement mechanisms, measurable outcomes of quality responsiveness, delivery, care, effectiveness. These measurable outcomes will include veterans and family satisfaction surveys.
3) Development of portability of care and service options for veterans to access alternative health care facilities of their choice.
4) Elimination of co-payments and fees for veterans' health benefits.
5) Development of standards of timely response standards from veterans service providers to their families. Congress can no longer be permitted to create bureaucracies that burden veterans and their families by allowing responses and decisions that are quite often not fair and more often than not untimely. The timeliness of responses and fairness of action by those agencies entrusted to protect and meet the needs of veterans and their families is a function of US Congressional oversight. Larry Smith will fight to include timeliness of response standards in his proposal of the US Veterans Compact.
6) Development of "Veterans Find" standards to aggressively identify veterans and their families who do not have the information needed to help them access services and programs.
7) Creation of mental health parity standards with portability of care for veterans.