WASHINGTON, DC — Republican legislators butted heads with VA officials last month over the question of whether department resources were being spent on immigrants who have been placed in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The confrontation came during a House VA Oversight Subcommittee hearing examining VA’s revolving funds, which contain enterprises within VA designed to be self-sustaining. That includes a 21-year-old agreement with ICE to handle the processing of medical claims for people in their custody.
Questions about this agreement have cropped up in Congress before, along with outcries that VA medical care was being used to treat nonveteran detainees. This most-recent wave includes proposed legislation introduced in December by House VA Committee Chairman Mike Bost (R-IL) that would bar VA from using any department resources on processing claims for ICE detainees.
Again, VA officials tried to put fears that VA is spending its own resources on detainees to rest.
“I think there’s been a lot of mischaracterizations in the media around the Financial Services Center’s relationship with [ICE],” VA Deputy Assistant Secretary Teresa Riffel told the subcommittee. “I want to make it really clear that there’s no VA funds or VA healthcare professionals that provide any services to those individuals who are in the custody of ICE. There never have. We’ve been doing this for over 20 years. The relationship is solely to process medical claims … and the IHSC [the ICE Health Service Corps] provides advance funds to the VA Financial Services Center for that work.”
As for why VA was originally contracted to do this work, Riffel explained that the skill to process healthcare claims is “actually fairly unique.”
“The Financial Services Center does this for VHA and also for this other government agency, IHSC,” she said. “Through economies of scale we’re able to spread the overhead necessary to perform this service.”
The partnership actually provides a net gain for VA and veterans, she noted.
“IHSC is absorbing some of the overhead in that medical claims processing product line,” she said. “It’s a good example of shared services across government.”
Several Democrats on the subcommittee spoke out against the interrogation of this agreement with ICE as empty political theater.
“The argument that this takes away manpower from processing veterans’ claims is blatantly false and intended to incite outrage against VA and migrant communities,” declared Rep. Frank Mrvan (D-Ind.).
However, Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT) latched onto the fact that ICE uses community healthcare providers to dispense care to detainees as a possible conflict of responsibility.
“Is it possible that some of the same healthcare providers who are part of the VA’s community care network would also be the same providers who treat the illegal immigrants who are detained by ICE?” he asked.
Riffel informed him that there was no analysis to indicate one way or the other whether this was true. This led to a contentious back-and-forth, with Rosendale attempting and ultimately failing to bait Riffel into admitting to the possibility.
“This arrangement could result in illegal immigrants receiving treatment before our veterans do,” Rosendale declared. “And, quite frankly, to this committee that is unacceptable.”
While much of the hearing was spent focusing on the ICE contract, concerns were raised around VA’s use of revolving funds as a whole. Its two largest funds—the Franchise Fund and Supply Fund—run into the billions of dollars and deal with everything from law enforcement training and debt collection to the sale of burial flags. Any profit from the various enterprises contained in the funds goes back into the funds’ reserves, rather than to the U.S. Treasury, placing these enterprises outside of the yearly congressional appropriations process.
House subcommittee Chair Jen Kiggans (R-Va.) noted that this could encourage VA to add new contracts to the funds for the sake of profit rather than the best interests of the department and veterans.
“The revolving fund may be an effective way to provide services but can always be a blind spot,” Kiggans said. “We need to make sure VA is not creating new enterprises for the sake of empire building.”