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Miller seeking new VA hospital for Eglin
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By Alvin Peabody
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Pensacola News Journal, March 23rd, 2007
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U.S. Rep. Jeff Miller has called for a halt to plans to build a $1.2 billion veterans hospital in New Orleans and instead put it at Eglin Air Force Base in Okaloosa County.
The U.S. Veterans Affairs Department has proposed a joint inpatient facility with Louisiana State University, whose flagship Charity Hospital was damaged in Hurricane Katrina. But the state Legislature voted last month against allocating its portion of $300 million toward the project from federal hurricane recovery funds that the state had received.
A final decision on the project is pending.
Miller, R-Chumuckla, seized on that uncertainty in a Feb. 22 letter to the House Veterans Affairs Committee. He argued that New Orleans did not meet the criteria for serving veterans because of its declining veterans population even before the hurricane, and because the proposed location is still in a flood-prone area.
"New Orleans ... doesn't have the veterans population to justify such a major medical facility," Miller said in an interview Thursday.
Miller, who also is a member of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, pointed to Northwest Florida as an underserved area for inpatient veterans care. His congressional district has one of the highest concentrations of veterans in the nation. But the closest VA inpatient care hospitals serving the more than 100,000 area veterans are in Alabama and Mississippi -- nearly two to three hours away.
"Having an inpatient facility in close proximity to where a large number of veterans reside is prudent and makes a whole lot of sense," said James Pritchard, president of the Pensacola Veterans Memorial Park Foundation.
Land availability is not an issue at Eglin, which is the largest Department of Defense installation in the world. Also, Eglin already plans to expand its current hospital care through a partnership with Florida State University Medical School.
"Having an affiliation between all of these groups is definitely a win-win situation for our veterans," Miller said.
"Veterans deserve timely access to health care, and this can happen when improved and expanded facilities are provided to where veterans both currently are and where they will be in the future, not where they used to be," Miller said.
Neither Reps. Bob Filner, D-Calif., nor Steve Buyer, chairman and ranking member of the committee, could be reached for comment. VA Secretary Jim Nicholson also was unavailable Thursday.
Bruce Furlow, a past president of the Military Officers Association of America, said he supports Miller's effort to bring the medical facility to Eglin.
"Inpatient care as a follow-up to other services already received by veterans in the area is crucial," Furlow said. "The need is more sensitive to those soldiers who are coming back from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."
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