FORT WAYNE – After prodding from his family, Ron Moser went to the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Fort Wayne because he was having “nightmares from hell.”
The Vietnam War veteran said he was given medication for flashbacks, informed he was mentally ill and threatened with a 72-hour stay for observation.
“This is going to follow you the rest of your life,” Moser said a doctor told him.
The Leesburg resident’s account was among complaints aired Tuesday at a forum on veterans’ issues conducted by Reps. Marlin Stutzman, R-3rd, and Jeff Miller, R-Fla. Miller is chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, and Stutzman is a member of the panel.
“It is not the VA system of years past,” Miller said, “but there are still problems.”
He heard about various troubles at the local medical center operated by VA Northern Indiana Health Care System.
Parking is scarce. Patient waits are long. Younger veterans receive better service than their older counterparts. The staff has been cut, and job vacancies go unfilled.
“You have a major problem out there with non-veterans running the place,” said Dave Cooper, a veteran who lives in Churubusco.
More than 150 people from a dozen counties attended the forum at Classic Café on Hillegas Road. VA officials were there but did not speak.
Some veterans praised the clinic and 26-bed hospital at Lake Avenue and Randallia Drive.
“They have done a remarkable job of taking care of the veterans,” said Jim Hamilton of Fremont.
“It’s been a positive experience for me,” said Daniel Ormsby of Columbia City.
Stutzman said the med center, which he and Miller toured earlier in the day, is developing a long-range plan for upgrading facilities and equipment.
“We are moving in the right direction,” Stutzman said.
VA has abandoned its 2009 plan to replace the medical center, which opened in 1950. It will instead rent a building for use as a mental health clinic, freeing up space for other services at the medical center.
“The idea of a new hospital was told to a lot of people, and that is not what was going to happen,” Miller said.
“This was going to be a giant super clinic with no inpatient beds,” he said about the proposal. “That would have been a disaster if that had happened, because you need the in-patient beds.”
Miller also said, “There are wonderful opportunities that are right in the campus area of the current VA Medical Center.”
The center is next door to Parkview Hospital. Parkview Health has built a regional medical center near Dupont Road and Interstate 69 and has expressed interest in making space available to VA at its Randallia Drive complex.
With Congress in recess this week, Miller is visiting VA sites in Fort Wayne, Dayton, St. Louis and Little Rock, Ark. He said the agency was unprepared for a surge in post-traumatic stress cases among soldiers returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The VA has to do a better job dealing with it. It is an invisible wound,” said Miller, whose district in the western panhandle of Florida has the highest concentration of veterans – 17.6 percent – in the nation.
Younger veterans are hesitant to seek help, said Tiffany Kravec-Kelly of IPFW Military Student Services.
“There is a stigma associated with going to the VA. They don’t want to go,” she said.
