Tester rallies support from veterans in Kalispell
KALISPELL — The senator was running late, but that didn't seem to matter much to the group of veterans gathered in the basement of a law firm here on a hot summer Friday evening. They had catching up and commiserating to do, and while somebody joked about finding a case of beer, it turns out there was an actual keg to be tapped.
The roughly two dozen men and women gathered to mark the launch of Veterans for Tester, representing a sliver of the 150 initial members of a group aiming to solidify support from one of incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester’s core constituencies.
The event was partly to rally the troops for what will undoubtedly be one of the hardest-fought elections anywhere in the country this year, as Tester squares off against Republican Tim Sheehy, the Belgrade CEO of an aerial firefighting company who has centered his campaign around his military service as a Navy SEAL. When all is said and done, political watchers expect a quarter of a billion dollars could be spent trying to persuade voters in an election that's predicted to be as close as a tick on a dog.
When Tester arrived, he spent the requisite amount of time reminding his supporters of bills he’s passed to fix problems they faced getting the benefits they are entitled to following their service. But the other segment of the evening was for the senator to get his marching orders — and he heard no shortage of frustrations over the problems facing vets trying to navigate the convoluted U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
“I take my instructions from veterans and we take those ideas and put them into effect,” Tester said shortly after he walked in, apologizing for his lateness by making a crack about passing a massive infrastructure bill that likely funded the road construction that held him up.
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Military veterans are seen at a Veterans Day event at Bigfork High School in November 2023. Voters in the state will decide next year if Sen. Jon Tester gets a fourth term as he's expected to face strong Republican opposition.
Over his three terms in the U.S. Senate, Tester has made veterans issues his main focus and he's now the chair of the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs. In past campaign cycles he’s both highlighted his successes and told vets he’s the one to elect to go back to D.C. to continue working on what people from both sides of the political aisle agree is a dysfunctional VA. But this election he faces an opponent who himself is a veteran, able to speak authentically to the issues he, his family and friends of his face in getting care. Both candidates are running copious advertising highlighting veterans, with Tester's featuring vets, some of which were in the room Friday, and Sheehy's ads full of images of him from his time in the service and in uniform, as well as those he served with.
There are about 87,600 veterans in Montana, making up nearly 9% of the state's population. That outpaces the 6.2% of the country who are vets. There's just one inpatient care site in the state, Fort Harrison in Helena, and 17 outpatient locations to cover 145,509 square miles. Cell and internet service is spotty, especially just up the road from where Tester met with vets last week, making telehealth an often unreliable option.
Many of the veterans in the room, though, remember when clinics numbered fewer and they thanked Tester for his work to improve access to health care. “You kept your promise to us,” said John Burgess, a Navy vet from Sommers. “You have our backs.”
Tester pointed out the veterans had also made a pledge. “This is a two-way street. You guys signed up, so some of you probably did it on your own accord, some of you may have been drafted,” Tester said, to which one veteran quipped “Or court-ordered.”
But no matter how they got there, Tester said “You guys and gals signed up to serve the country and you did your job. We also made commitments to you that when you come back, we're going to have your back. … We ain’t fully there yet, by the way. We’ve still got more to do.”
Tester started the session by running through a list of bills he’s passed and some of them written. There’s the Commander John Scott Hannon Veterans Mental Health Care Improvement Act that creates access to outside-the-box services to help prevent suicide. In 2022 it was the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act, better known as the PACT Act, which expands presumptive benefits for toxic-exposed veterans. There’s also the Deborah Sampson Act, which ensures women veterans — who make up less than 10% of the population in Montana — get access to women's health care. Six years ago, just before his last re-election, former President Donald Trump signed Tester's MISSION Act, which got rid of the failed Choice Program and created a new community care framework.
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Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., speaks with a veteran at a Veterans Day event at Bigfork High School in 2023. The Montana Democrat is seeking re-election to a fourth term.
That legislation, along with other bills that have crossed the finish line in recent years, have direct implications for vets in Montana. William Austin, an Air National Guard veteran from Polson, said he was forced to medically retire and until a law passed in 2008 he couldn’t access any of his benefits. Now he can get half of his retirement pension, but he’s looking to the Major Richard Star Act to protect the program that allows his wife to be his caregiver, a provision that if lost would cost his family about $1,800 a month.
“Without this Richard Star Act, a lot of people are going to suffer,” Austin said.
The bill is the biggest veterans-related legislation in play right now, Tester said. It’s meant to ensure vets who are forced to retire early continue to get benefits. The goal is to get it passed and to the president before the end of this congressional term, but if not, it’s the top priority for the next Congress, Tester said, which he's running to be a part of.
Another veteran questioned the senator about efforts in Indian Country. Tester said he’s built relationships with tribal councils and that he tries to hire people in each of Montana’s eight tribal communities because each group faces their own unique challenges.
Indian Health Services has its own woes, Tester said, and he called for IHS and the VA working better together to help improve access to doctors and make health care spending go farther. There’s also potential in telehealth to serve rural areas, he said, but first the broadband infrastructure needs to get built out. That same infrastructure bill he joked about earlier has money to expand broadband, but the work isn't done yet.
The rest of the meeting veered to the vets sharing their frustrations over the issues left unresolved, and that list was long. One man in the room was on hold with the pharmacy at Fort Harrison for 23 minutes earlier that day. Another woman said she was a former psychiatrist for the VA in Missoula but left a number of years ago because the hiring process was so slow it burnt out providers who took on massive workloads left by vacant positions. Medications don’t get shipped locally anymore, leading to long wait times, another vet said.
Terry Beezley, an Air Force veteran from Eureka, said an influx of vets moving to the Flathead are being met with long wait times for appointments, lack of telehealth services because of poor internet access and problems getting paid for their travel to care.
Aspects of the community care program, which lets vets see a local doctor when a VA one is too far away, drew considerable criticism, especially around scheduling appointments. Clifford Nielsen told Tester he got a letter just the day asking him to make a May 15 appointment.
While some of the issues were new to him, others Tester said he was aware of and working on. “We’ll get it,” Tester said.
The laundry list of what needs to be fixed at the VA is what Sheehy, the senator’s opponent, points to when he tells voters that it’ll take new blood to right the ship. In a debate earlier in June, Sheehy was blunt about the agency.
“The worst problem with veteran care is the transition from active duty to VA care. That handoff has still not been figured out after 20 years of constant war,” Sheehy said.
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Military veterans are seen at a Veterans Day event at Bigfork High School in November 2023. Voters in the state will decide next year if Sen. Jon Tester gets a fourth term as he's expected to face strong Republican opposition.
While he said the VA was “filled with good people,” it’s “an old bureaucracy that needs to get overhauled because it's not meeting the needs of our veterans.”
“I know that personally, as a wounded veteran, as a VA health care enrollee, as the husband of a veteran, and my entire social circle is veterans,” Sheehy said. “The VA is not stepping up and doing what it needs to do for American veterans. It's about time we hold them accountable and get that agency overhauled so we can do its job.”
Sheehy said he recently helped a Billings vet who had lost both his legs get the care he needed from a local hospital.
“Oftentimes, we're helping folks like that get private care with donor money, with private money helping solve issues, because the VA can't get it done,” Sheehy said.
In the debate, Tester acknowledged the work left to do.
“Do we need to do more? You're damn right we need to do more. The issue around suicide and mental health is a crisis all across this country, and it's particularly acute with our veterans. We need to get more folks that are psychologists, psychiatrists into the VA.”
But to Sheehy, Tester’s had nearly 18 years to try to make structural changes and the time has come for a new person to take a shot.
“We need new leadership in the VA, we need the agency to be reformed to actually focus on the needs of veterans,” Sheehy said. In his closing remarks, he again said it was time for change.
“We cannot keep having more of the same. We cannot keep sending the same politicians back into office over and over and over again and expecting different results.”
Tester, however, argues there are benefits to longevity. Having served on the Veterans' Affairs Committee since his first year in the Senate back in 2007, Tester became its top Democrat in 2017 and now chairs the committee.
Asked by a vet Friday what his seniority means, Tester answered by pointing out the state has 12 brand-new clinics, not counting smaller ones added around Montana.
“Denis McDonough’s number is in my phone,” Tester said of the VA’s secretary. “If I called him right now, I would almost guarantee before you got done eating supper he’d be calling me back. Not everybody gets that, and the reason is because we’ve got a very close working relationship.”
The two don’t always agree, Tester said, like when the VA recently stopped hiring mental health workers. But “I call him up, he answers, he responds and assured me that they’re going to take care of the problem. … We’ll continue to put pressure on them until they do.”
Holly Michels is the head of the Montana State News Bureau. You can reach her at holly.michels@lee.net