President Obama is asked to visit VA during Phoenix trip

PHOENIX — Concerned Veterans for America have called upon President Barack Obama to visit the scandal-plagued Carl T. Hayden VA Medical Center during his visit to Phoenix on Thursday.

The president is set to deliver a speech at Central High School which is approximately one mile from the hospital where the national wait-list scandal first broke.

“We hope but not holding my breath,” said Dan Caldwell of Concerned Veterans for America. “He’s been very hands off throughout this entire scandal, he’s not shown interest in reforming and fixing the VA beyond signing a bill that he had no role in helping craft and moving through Congress.”

According to the organization, since the scandal broke and the poor state of the veterans’ healthcare in American was in, at-best, a poor state, the president has not paid a visit to any Veterans Affairs facility to see for himself how the system is failing our nation’s heroes.

Sen. John McCain has also asked the president to pay the facility a visit to meet with veterans and whistle-blowers.

In a statement, McCain said, “It has been nine months since reports surfaced of veterans dying due to gross mismanagement and neglect at the Phoenix VA, and despite the passage of bipartisan reform legislation, our veterans community continues to have a serious lack of trust in the VA. This Thursday, President Obama plans to promote his failed economic agenda during a visit to Central High School in Phoenix, just a mile from the Carl T. Hayden VA Medical Center, where this national scandal first started. I urge the president to take time during his trip this week to visit the Phoenix VA to begin to restore our veterans’ confidence in it and demonstrate his commitment to fully reforming the VA system which has too often failed them.”