Hotline attempts to keep promises to veterans
SHEPHERDSTOWN, W.Va. – The phones rang early in the morning and late in the evening. They rang, always, in the middle of the night. They were ringing now, as Mary Hendricks sank into a swivel chair and settled in beside her co-workers for another day of answering them. The calls came from veterans who were about to be evicted. Veterans who couldn’t get hold of their doctors. Veterans who needed to talk about what they saw in Afghanistan or Iraq or Vietnam. Mary pressed a button. Her headset clicked on. “This is the White House VA hotline,” she said, introducing herself by first name only. “How can I help you?” Here in a small West Virginia town, 74 miles from the White House, a Donald Trump campaign promise is being fulfilled. He told the country’s 20 million veterans that if they had an issue with the Department of Veterans Affairs, there would be a number they could call 24 hours a day to talk to a real person. On this day in late July, as Mary was beginning a conversation with one of those veterans, Trump was standing before a crowd of them at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention in Missouri, introducing a new VA secretary, Robert Wilkie. The department Wilkie was about to take over had endured months of turmoil. Trump had fired his predecessor via tweet. Longtime employees had been dismissed and demoted. The bipartisanship that once existed inside the halls of the federal government’s second-largest agency had been replaced by political infighting over how veterans should be cared for. All the while, the veterans who were supposed to receive that care kept calling this room inside a nondescript office building to report what was going wrong with it. “We’re going to try to get you some help,” Mary said to the man on her line now, an Air Force veteran who had erroneously received a bill for $350.18. He did not have $350.18. “I will instruct my staff that if a valid complaint is not addressed, that the issue be brought directly to me,” Trump said in 2016. “I will pick up the phone and fix it myself if I have to.” But for now, the only person trying to fix it was Mary, a 44-yearold widow with blond hair, a cross around her neck and long lavender nails that clacked on her keyboard. She had learned so much about VA that she wished she had known when her husband, an Army veteran, had been alive. But still, she could not make the $350.18 bill go away. She could not see why it was sent. She could not access benefits or medical records, even with the man’s permission. She wasn’t allowed to call his provider. All she could do was type his problem and send it to a different team in a different place that would respond in approximately 60 business days, if it responded on time. Listen. Type. Send. This was what the 60 customer service agents could do for the 107,000 calls that had come in since June 2017. On this day, there would be 584 more. Some veterans believed it was helping. Some said it was just another layer of bureaucracy. Mary said only, “You’re very welcome, sir. Have a wonderful day,” and waited for the phone to ring again. ––– The history of the Department of Veterans Affairs is entwined with scandal, from its very first leader – an embezzler – under President Warren Harding to the revelation under President Barack Obama that VA hospitals were lying about how long veterans were waiting for care. Obama brought in a new VA secretary, Robert McDonald, to fix it. One of McDonald’s solutions: A hotline. At first, the line was his cellphone number, which he gave out at news conferences, saying, “Call me Bob.” Then he created MyVA311, another line for an agency that has staffed hotlines for everything from quitting smoking to learning about the flu to coping after seeing “Saving Private Ryan.” VA has nearly 20 phone numbers listed on its website as national hotlines, help lines or call centers. These are in addition to the call centers run by individual VA hospitals and veterans service organizations. The allure of a hotline is that problems cannot be remedied unless they are first reported. But just because problems are reported doesn’t mean they will be fixed, said Joe Plenzler, spokesman for the American Legion. That’s why organizations like his are skeptical of Trump’s version of the idea, which has an annual budget of $7.4 million. “We are asking: Is it action? Or is it just the appearance of action?” Plenzler said. On the day after Trump’s speech with Wilkie, the action for Mary began with Diet Pepsi and Sheetz coffee, both of which she needed to get through eight hours of calls. (To protect the privacy of veterans, VA officials permitted The Washington Post to listen only to the call takers’ side of the conversations.) “I am so sorry,” Mary told the first veteran routed to her phone, as if it were her fault that the Army reservist had been denied the benefits he believed he deserved. Her computer showed he had called many times. “Veteran with brain damage” was how the last call taker described the first of his problems.