Rahall Meets with Veterans and VA Officials

Press Release

At the VA Medical Center in Huntington, U.S. Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) Wednesday lauded the efforts of the VA staff in caring for West Virginia veterans and vowed to continue pressing for the resources and tools necessary for VA officials to serve veterans and their families.

"Being a longtime advocate of our veterans, I know that a robust veterans' budget is essential to ensuring that the VA facilities in our State can provide quality care for our veterans. Using the experience I have accumulated and a little West Virginia tenacity, I have pressed the VA to constantly reassess the needs of our underserved areas to ensure that every veteran has access to the services and benefits they were promised," said Rahall.

Rahall, a Member of the House Military Veterans Caucus, has worked with his colleagues in Congress to exempt VA services and programs from ongoing budget cuts in Washington and been successful in securing additional resources for the VA Medical Centers in Beckley and Huntington, as well as the outpatient facilities and mobile clinic in West Virginia's southern counties.

He also has cosponsored and supported legislation, which was recently passed by the House of Representatives, to increase post-military employment opportunities for veterans, and to reduce the backlog of veterans' appeals and ensure that veterans' benefits are not needlessly held up in a lengthy bureaucratic process.

"Our State's VA facilities are hiring new mental health personnel and finding new and innovative ways to treat our veterans population through home-based services, telemedicine, rural outreach programs, and mobile health services. As the Federal budget tightens, our State's VA facilities have demonstrated their ability to be creative in expanding access to care for our veterans, and I have pressed for legislation in Washington to give our VA officials the flexibility they need to do so," said Rahall.

"Through the partnerships I have built over the course of my career, I have worked for VA officials, many of whom are veterans themselves, to get the resources and tools they need to process VA claims accurately and expediently. Most recently, the House passed legislation that I cosponsored to authorize veterans' benefits for each component of a claim while it is being adjudicated, so that veterans do not have to wait for the entire claim to be resolved before receiving a benefit. With a little more bipartisan commonsense, we can do more for our veterans," said Rahall.

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