mr. rowan, thank you for your testimony. you're recognized for five minutes. >> thank you chairman isakson chairman roe ranking member brown, members of the panel. one of the issues that i would like to bring up on behalf of the blinded veterans, the blind veterans association and our national president, mark cornell, is senate bill 171 and house resolution 288. what those bills are asking for are transportation for the catastrophically disabled veteran to one of the many v.a. rehab centers we have. there are 13 blind rehab centers and i think 26 spinal cord facilities. the way the law is written title 38, section 11, the secretary will grant travel for service connected who are catastrophically disabled. most of our members in the blind veterans association, their blindness is due to age-related illness. macular degeneration. so they don't qualify to these blind rehappen centers. the blind rehab centers have only a 70% bed occupies. why is that? because we -- occupancy. why is that? because we

mr. rowan: swear everybody in that comes before you. mr. roe: we are doing that now. i would have never thought in my lifetime when i came up here that anybody would come up in front of a congressional committee and deliberately mislead us. maybe i'm naive. probably am. but the truth always needs to be told in front of these committees. and mr. rowan we are doing that. mr. rowan: when you look at your budgets, pare away the administrative overhead. it's ridiculous. the divisions just got fat with administrators. they are not health related people. you need to get the v.a. to break down their staff which they don't do very well at all. between administrators and health providers. i think if you start seeing that in your accountability aspects you get a much clearer idea what's going on. mr. row: the other thing that we have to do and the v.a. has had the capacity to allow veterans to go off, i saw -- as a physician i saw veterans in my office. and they absolutely make it so hard it's unbelievabl

and mr. rowan we are doing that. mr. rowan: when you look at your budgets, pare away the administrative overhead. it's ridiculous. the divisions just got fat with administrators. they are not health related people. you need to get the v.a. to break down their staff which they don't do very well at all. between administrators and health providers. i think if you start seeing that in your accountability aspects you get a much clearer idea what's going on. mr. row: the other thing that we have to do and the v.a. has had the capacity to allow veterans to go off, i saw -- as a physician i saw veterans in my office. and they absolutely make it so hard it's unbelievable you would make it so hard for a veteran who wants care to get outside the v.a. system. that is mind-boggling to me. if you have a service that's provided in the community, the veteran wants to go there, they can't get the service at the v.a., let the veteran do that. mr. minney, you are absolutely spot on. i as one congressman want to help you make sure we can ge

the question i have and mr. rowan and mr. rieckhoff and anybody else on the panel the thing that senator blumenthal just alluded to on these backlog of disability claims, give me one or two specific things we need to do. i understand how bad it is. i'm on the -- i'm the chair of the subcommittee of disability assistance. we see those figures and we want to fix it. and we want to fix it efficiently and as quickly as we can. help us out here and, mr. rowan, i know you were saying as far as the officers that no long areaer address these claims, but give us specifics we can take back to our committees and start -- yes, sir. >> i would add one simple change that could be done right now on the board of veterans appeals is to allow the veterans appeals attorneys, when they make a ruling make it precedential. so when somebody decides something, it becomes law. so any other case that is similar to that should be adjudicated along those lines. i mean this is the only kind of legal structure where that does not occur. i mean, and so we

mr. rowan, i know you were saying as far as the officers that no longer address these claims, give us some specifics that we can take back to our committees and start -- yes, sir. mr. rowan: i would add one simple change that can be done right now in the board of veterans appeals is allow the veterans appeals attorneys when they make a ruling, make it presidential. so that when somebody decides something, it's now become law so that any other case that's similar to that should be adjudicated along those lines. this is the only kind of legal structure where that does not occur. so we can be attorneys sitting next to each other making totally different rulings on the same type of case. that's number one. the other thing is figuring out how to really redo that whole system. it just doesn't make sense. the other thing i think is get us back access at the regional offices. stop having our claims sent everywhere except where we are. i have a regional -- one of my people is working in the buffalo regi

mr. rowan, you made an excellent point. the majority of people that our committing suicide are actually in the '50s and things, so it's just something that went to go forward with. mr. minney come you mentioned the travel for non-service-connected individuals with vision problems. what is the major disease that they have that is affecting them? do you know what the primary non-service-connected disease that is causing blindness? >> right now it's a tossup between macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy. .net across the being associated with diabetes, vietnam community, how they are coming down with diabetes to agent orange. so now that diabetes is calling -- >> diabetes connected to agent orange and then the resulting vision impairment, that's not service-connected? >> it's a fight to get a second and third, secondary disease associated. >> we need to fix that. that's an excellent point. one of the problems that we're having in arkansas, and i note throughout the country, there's been a problem with va reimbursing loca

mr. rowan, i wonder, if you could tell me could you explain quickly what's the retionship with i.o.m. and the v.a.? what do they do together and what's going on here? mr. rowan: the institute of medicine was brought into play back in the 91 act of the agent orange act in 1991 where basically the institute of medicine was asked on a biannual basis to report on research they would look at of agent orange related research and any diseases that they felt were identified as a result of that. that would then eventually end up on the presumptive list which unfortunately, is rather substantial through vietnam veterans. that's been the thing. the problem is one of the reasons we talk about doing research is, in fact, there is no research. the v.a. has never done research on agent orange. i.o.m. was scratching around wherever they could find stuff instead of having original research to review. it was a shame. the i.o.m. in the toxic research acts we are talking about, we are also talking about -- which w