VA facing blowback for helping pay out millions of dollars to medical providers who treat illegal immigrants while they are in federal custody \u2014 while a backlog of\u00a0hundreds of thousands of claims\u00a0from veterans has grown.The VA\u2019s Austin, Texas-based Financial Services Center (FSC) has been contracted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since 2002 to process reimbursement claims by providers who offer services to detained migrants.In fiscal year 2022, which ended Sept. 30 of that year, FSC processed 161,538 such claims, with the ICE Health Services Corps (IHSC) paying out an average of $584 \u2014 a total of $94.3 million in taxpayer money, according to a July 2023\u00a0Department of Homeland Security report\u00a0on \u201cHealthcare Costs for Noncitizens in Detention.\u201dIn the previous fiscal year, 2021, ICE\u2019s health care arm budgeted more than $74 million for the VA\u2019s FSC to assist with \u201coutside referral care\u201d and \u201cmedical claims processing,\u201d\u00a0according to a report from July 2022.Meanwhile, the pile of benefit claims by\u00a0veterans and their families\u00a0awaiting adjudication has grown to 417,855, according to the VA\u2019s own website \u2014 up from around 150,000 as of late 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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When contacted by The Post, the VA was adamant that the veteran claims backlog and the millions of dollars doled out to migrant health care providers were not related.\u201cVA does not provide or fund any health care to ICE detainees,\u201d VA spokesman Terrence Hayes told The Post.\u201cThis involves no more than 10 employees and is fully funded by ICE. This has no impact [on] veteran care or services,\u201d Hayes added. \u201cAt no time are any VA health care professionals or VA funds used for this purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A handful of Republican lawmakers ripped the VA for working with ICE to pay for medical treatment of people who they say shouldn\u2019t be in the US at all.\u201cI am a disabled veteran and get 100% of my health care through the Veterans\u2019 Affairs system,\u201d Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.), a retired Navy SEAL who sits on the House Committee on Veterans\u2019 Affairs, told The Post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
VA ripped for helping pay migrant treatment as over 400K veterans, their families wait VA facing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/whatistandfor.co\/LeFachicette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/whatistandfor.co\/LeFachicette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/whatistandfor.co\/LeFachicette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whatistandfor.co\/LeFachicette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whatistandfor.co\/LeFachicette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/whatistandfor.co\/LeFachicette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":548,"href":"http:\/\/whatistandfor.co\/LeFachicette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547\/revisions\/548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/whatistandfor.co\/LeFachicette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whatistandfor.co\/LeFachicette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whatistandfor.co\/LeFachicette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}