The bill
A resolution recognizing community care as an essential tool for meeting the health care needs of the veterans of the United States.
SRES. 492, 119th Congress — read as touching Hospitals & Health Systems.
A resolution recognizing community care as an essential tool for meeting the health care needs of the veterans of the United States.
Download PDFBill ID: 119/sres/492
Last Updated: November 11, 2025
Sponsored by
Sen. Blackburn, Marsha [R-TN]
ID: B001243
Follow the money
The sponsor
Sen. Blackburn, Marsha [R-TN]
Every bill has someone who introduced it. That name is where the paper trail starts.
The money
$166,000 raised
26 itemised contributions to this sponsor, pulled from FEC filings.
The alignment
85% match to Project 2025
This bill's text tracks the "Department of Veterans Affairs" section, p. 676-678 of the Mandate for Leadership.
Bill's Journey to Becoming a Law
Track this bill's progress through the legislative process
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📍 Current Status
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🏛️
Committee Review
🗳️
Floor Action
✅
Passed Senate
🏛️
House Review
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Passed Congress
🖊️
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Became Law
📚 How does a bill become a law?
1. Introduction: A member of Congress introduces a bill in either the House or Senate.
2. Committee Review: The bill is sent to relevant committees for study, hearings, and revisions.
3. Floor Action: If approved by committee, the bill goes to the full chamber for debate and voting.
4. Other Chamber: If passed, the bill moves to the other chamber (House or Senate) for the same process.
5. Conference: If both chambers pass different versions, a conference committee reconciles the differences.
6. Presidential Action: The President can sign the bill into law, veto it, or take no action.
7. Became Law: If signed (or if Congress overrides a veto), the bill becomes law!
Bill Summary
Another meaningless resolution from our esteemed leaders, designed to make them look like they care about veterans while actually doing nothing of substance. Let's dissect this farce.
**Main Purpose & Objectives:** This resolution is a feel-good exercise in grandstanding, pretending to recognize the importance of community care for veterans. The main objective is to allow politicians to pat themselves on the back and claim they're supporting our nation's heroes without actually doing anything tangible.
**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** There are no provisions or changes to existing law here. This resolution is a non-binding, symbolic gesture that doesn't even have the power of a strongly worded letter. It's a waste of time and paper.
**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** The only parties affected by this resolution are the politicians who get to pretend they care about veterans and the lobbyists who will use this as an excuse to wine and dine them. Veterans themselves won't see any actual benefits or changes in their care.
**Potential Impact & Implications:** Zero. Zilch. Nada. This resolution is a placebo, meant to make people feel good without actually addressing the real issues facing veterans' healthcare. It's a distraction from the fact that our politicians are more interested in lining their own pockets and advancing their careers than in genuinely helping those who have served.
Now, let's get to the underlying disease here: this resolution is a symptom of a deeper illness – the cowardice and incompetence of our elected officials. They're too afraid to take real action on veterans' healthcare, so they resort to empty gestures like this. It's a classic case of "Legislative Theater," where politicians pretend to care about an issue while actually doing nothing.
In medical terms, this resolution is akin to prescribing a patient with a terminal illness a sugar pill and telling them it'll cure their cancer. It's a cruel joke, and our politicians should be ashamed of themselves for perpetuating it. But hey, at least they get to look good on camera, right?
Related Topics
Military & Veterans Affairs
Generated using Llama 3.1 70B (Dr. Haus personality)
💰 Campaign Finance Network
Sen. Blackburn, Marsha [R-TN]
Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle
Total Contributions
$166,000
23 donors
PACs
$5,000
Organizations
$7,900
Committees
$0
Individuals
$153,100
1
FRIENDS OF COMMUNITY ONCOLOGY PAC
$5,000
1
THE COGGIN GROUP
$5,400
2
DOSS BROTHERS FARM
$2,000
3
BL PARTNERS GROUP LLC
$500
No committee contributions found
1
KING, RODNEY W.
$13,200
2
KINNEY, CHRIS
$13,200
3
BEAN, BILL G.
$10,000
4
SMITH, THOMAS
$10,000
5
GAMBLE, KATHRYN
$9,900
6
NEWVERRY, KARMA
$9,900
7
WETHERINGTON, WILLIAM MICHAEL MR.
$7,600
8
HAMPTON, GEORGE
$6,700
9
HARWELL, SAMUEL K. MR. IV
$6,600
10
HARWELL, SAMUEL K.
$6,600
11
KING, MARY L.
$6,600
12
SENSING, LUCY T. MRS.
$6,600
13
VITAL, GREG A.
$6,600
14
BRADLEY, JACQUELINE
$6,600
15
PRESTON, CASEY MS.
$6,600
16
DEVOS, BETSY
$6,600
17
DEVOS, DANIEL G. MR.
$6,600
18
DEVOS, DOUGLAS L. MR.
$6,600
19
DEVOS, RICHARD M. JR.
$6,600
Donor Network - Sen. Blackburn, Marsha [R-TN]
PACs
Organizations
Individuals
Politicians
Hub layout: Politicians in center, donors arranged by type in rings around them.
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Showing 48 nodes and 26 connections (55 secondary connections hidden)
Total contributions: $166,000
Top Donors - Sen. Blackburn, Marsha [R-TN]
Showing top 23 donors by contribution amount
1 PAC3 Orgs19 Individuals
Industry Impact
Which industries are materially affected by specific provisions in this bill. 2 helped.
- +Hospitals & Health Systemsconfidence 0.90
Resolution recognizes community care as essential for veterans' health needs and urges VA to implement VA MISSION Act to ensure timely access to community providers, which benefits hospitals and health systems that provide community care.
- +Health Insuranceconfidence 0.85
Resolution supports community care expansion for veterans, which likely increases demand for private health insurance services covering community-based care, affirming its role as complement to VA.
Who funds the sponsor on these industries
For each industry this bill affects, here's what the sponsor (Sen. Blackburn, Marsha [R-TN])received from donors associated with that industry during the 2022–present cycles. Donations are not proof of intent — they are a record of who funds the people writing the law.
Industries this bill HELPS
- from 3 contributions
- HAMMONS, KEVIN J.$2,500
- LOWE, SCOTT S.$2,000
- RUDISILL, PAMELA T.$1,500
- Health Insurance$1,516from 3 contributions
- PENBERTHY, SHANNON$1,500
- PICKERING, EMILY$16
Project 2025 Policy Matches
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document.AI-enhanced analysis provides detailed alignment ratings.
Department of Veterans Affairs
Strong
Vector: 66%Pages: 676-678AI Enhanced
AI Analysis:
"SRES 492 directly affirms the importance of community care and urges full implementation of the VA MISSION Act, which aligns with Project 2025’s goal to strengthen community care, codify MISSION Act access standards, and ensure veterans timely access to high-quality care."
Key themes:community careVA MISSION Act implementationveteran access to carestrengthening VA‑community partnershiptimely, high-quality veteran care
— 644 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise In sum, the VA for the foreseeable future will experience significant fiscal, human capital, and infrastructure crosswinds and risks. Budgets are at historic highs, and with a workforce now above 400,000, the VA is contending with a lack of new veteran enrollees to offset the declining population of older veterans. Recruitment of medical and benefits personnel has become more challenging. Veterans are migrating from the northern states to the southern and western states for retirement and employment. Meanwhile, VA information technol- ogy (IT) is struggling to keep pace with the evolution of patient care and record keeping. Consequently, VA leaders in the next Administration must be wise and courageous political strategists, experienced managers to run day-to-day oper- ations more effectively, innovators to address the changing veteran landscape, and agile “fixers” to mitigate and repair systemic problems created or ignored by the present leadership team. VETERANS HEALTH ADMINISTRATION (VHA) Needed Reforms l Rescind all departmental clinical policy directives that are contrary to principles of conservative governance starting with abortion services and gender reassignment surgery. Neither aligns with service-connected conditions that would warrant VA’s providing this type of clinical care, and both follow the Left’s pernicious trend of abusing the role of government to further its own agenda. l Focus on the effects of shifting veteran demographics. At least during the next decade, the VA will experience a significant generational shift in its overall patient population. Of the approximately 18 million veterans alive today, roughly 9.1 million are enrolled for VA health care, and 6.4 million of these enrollees use VA health care consistently. These 6.4 million veterans are split almost evenly between those who are over age 65 and those who are under age 65, but the share of VA’s health care dollars is spent predominantly in the over-65 cohort. That share increases significantly as veterans live longer and use the VHA system at a higher rate. VHA enrollments of new users are increasingly at risk of being exceeded by the deaths of current enrollees, primarily because significant numbers of the Vietnam generation are reaching their life expectancy. The generational transition from Vietnam-era veterans to post-9/11 veterans will take several years to complete. The ongoing demographic transition is a catalyst for needed assessments of how the VA can improve the delivery of care to a numerically declining and differently dispersed national population — 645 — Department of Veterans Affairs of veterans—a population that is more active, reaching middle age or retirement age, and migrating for lifestyle and career reasons. At the center of the VHA’s evolution during this generational transition is an ongoing tension, some of it politically contrived, between Direct Care for Veterans provided from inside the VHA system and Community Care for Veterans who are referred to private providers participating in the VHA’s two Community Care Networks (CCNs). In recent years, the budget for Community Care has grown as demand from veterans has risen sharply, sometimes outpacing the budgets for Community Care at individual VAMCs. The Trump Administration made Community Care part of its “Veteran- centric” approach to ensure that veterans would be able to participate more fully in their health care decisions and have options if or when the VHA was unable to meet their needs. The Biden Administration has watered down that effort, has sought various procedural ways to slow the rate of referrals to private doctors, and at some facilities is reportedly manipulating the Community Care access standards required by the VA MISSION Act of 2018. If the makeup of Congress is favorable in 2025, the next Administration should rapidly and explicitly codify VA MISSION Act access standards in legislation to prevent the VA from avoiding or watering down the requirements in the future. First and foremost, a veterans bill of rights is needed so that veterans and VA staff know exactly what benefits veterans are entitled to receive, with a clear process for the adjudication of disputes, and so that staff ensure that all veterans are informed of their eligibility for Community Care. Currently, veterans are not routinely and consistently told that they are eligible for Community Care unless they request information or are given a referral. l To strengthen Community Care, the next Administration should create new Secretarial directives to implement the VA MISSION Act properly. Sections for consideration and areas for reform include the following: 1. Sections 101 and 103 (Community Care eligibility for access standards and the best medical interest of the veteran). 2. Section 104 (Community Care access standards and standards for quality of care).
Department of Transportation
Strong
Vector: 65%Pages: 673-675AI Enhanced
AI Analysis:
"SRES 492 strongly aligns with Project 2025's VA policy by affirming the importance of community care under the VA MISSION Act of 2018, promoting veteran-centric access, and supporting timely, high-quality care—core goals emphasized in the Project 2025 vision for a reformed, veteran-focused VA."
Key themes:veteran-centric careVA MISSION Act implementationcommunity care accesstimely healthcare deliveryVA reform
— 641 — 20 DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS Brooks D. Tucker MISSION STATEMENT The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is the primary provider of health care, benefits, and memorial affairs for America’s veterans and their families. The VA has the noble responsibility to render exceptional and timely support and services with respect, compassion, and competence. The veteran is at the forefront of every VA process and interaction. The VA must continually strive to be recognized as a “best in class,” “Veteran-centric”1 system with an organizational ethos inspired by and accountable to the needs and problems of veterans, not subservient to the parochial preferences of a bureaucracy. OVERVIEW At the end of the Obama Administration, the VA was held in low esteem both by the veterans it served and by the employees who served these former warriors. Eroding morale caused by the downstream effects of a health care access crisis in 2014 led to the resignation of Secretary Eric Shinseki and extensive oversight investigations by Congress from 2015–2016. By 2020, however, the VA had become one of the most respected U.S. agencies. This significant progress was due in part to the leadership of Secretary Robert Wilkie (2018–2021) and his team of political appointees and career senior executives, many of them veterans, who led the effort to ensure that the VA became “Veteran-centric” in its governance decisions and fostered a more positive work environment. This mindset translated into a department that was better attuned to employees’ and veterans’ needs and experiences in the daily operations of health care, benefits, — 642 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise and memorial affairs. During that period, the VA received the largest number of watershed congressional authorizations to reform its health care and benefits that it had received since the post–Vietnam War years along with historic increases in annual appropriations, which have tripled since the last full year of the George W. Bush Administration. The current VA leadership team of Biden appointees has adopted some of their predecessors’ governance processes. However, they have not sustained the previous Administration’s commitment to a genuine “Veteran-centric” philosophy, most nota- bly with respect to the delivery of health care, and harbor a bias toward expanding the unionized federal employee workforce that has not always been aligned with a focus on “Veteran-centric” care. There also is growing concern in Congress and the veteran community that the VA is poorly managing and in some cases disregarding provisions of the VA MISSION [Maintaining Internal Systems and Strengthening Integrated Out- side Networks] Act of 20182 that codify broad access for veterans to non-VA health care providers. Efforts to expand disability benefits to large populations without adequate planning have caused an erosion of veterans’ trust in the VA enterprise. Additionally, the current VA leadership is focusing very publicly on “social equity and inclusion” within departmental policy discussions toward ends that will affect only a small minority of the veterans who use the VA. For the first time, the VA is allowing access to abortion services, a medical procedure unrelated to military service that the VA lacks the legal authority and clinical proficiency to perform. In addition to continuing the grotesque culture of violence against the child in the womb, these sociopolitical initiatives and ideological indoctrinations distract from the department’s core missions. DEPARTMENTAL HISTORY Following the Civil War, state veterans homes were established to provide med- ical and hospital treatment for all injuries and diseases. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, “Congress established a new system of Veterans benefits, including programs for disability compensation, insurance for service personnel and Veterans, and vocational rehabilitation for the disabled”3 that was overseen by three different federal programs: the Veterans Bureau, the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Pensions, and the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers. In 1921, Congress combined those programs into the Veterans Bureau. Following World War II, a national VA hospital system, much of which remains operational today, was established to care for millions of returning veterans. Following the Vietnam War, the VA’s federally owned and operated hospital network expanded again to meet the needs of the volunteer and draftee population. In the past two decades, the VA has purposely transitioned to leasing medical prop- erties rather than building expensive new facilities that can take years to complete and often experience budget overruns. As the nature of health care has evolved
Department of Veterans Affairs
Strong
Vector: 65%Pages: 679-681AI Enhanced
AI Analysis:
"SRES 492 strongly aligns with Project 2025's VA healthcare objectives by affirming community care as essential, supporting timely access per the MISSION Act, and advocating for expanded community-based care—directly mirroring Project 2025's emphasis on expanding CBOCs, leveraging community partnerships, and improving access through non-VA providers."
Key themes:community care expansiontimely access to careVA MISSION Act implementationveteran-centered healthcarestrengthened VA-community provider partnerships
— 647 — Department of Veterans Affairs reimagine the health care footprint in some locales, and spur a realignment of capacity through budgetary allocations. Specifically: 1. Embrace the expansion of Community Based Outpatient Clinics (CBOCs) as an avenue to maintain a VA footprint in challenging medical markets without investing further in obsolete and unaffordable VA health care campuses. 2. Explore the potential to pilot facility-sharing partnerships between the VA and strained local health care systems to reduce costs by leveraging limited talent and resources. Personnel l Extend the term of the Under Secretary for Health (USH) to five years. Additionally, authority should be given to reappoint this individual for a second five-year term both to allow for continuity and to protect the USH from political transition. l Establish a Senior Executive Service (SES) position of VHA Care System Chief Information Officer (CIO), selected by and reporting to the chief of the VHA Care System with a dotted line to the VA CIO. l Identify a workflow process to bring wait times in compliance with VA MISSION Act–required time frames wherever possible. 1. Assess the daily clinical appointment load for physicians and clinical staff in medical facilities where wait times for care are well outside of the time frames required by the VA MISSION Act. 2. Require VHA facilities to increase the number of patients seen each day to equal the number seen by DOD medical facilities: approximately 19 patients per provider per day. Currently, VA facilities may be seeing as few as six patients per provider per day. 3. Consider a pilot program to extend weekday appointment hours and offer Saturday appointment options to veterans if a facility continues to demonstrate that it has excess capacity and is experiencing delays in the delivery of care for veterans. 4. Identify clinical services that are consistently in high demand but require cost-prohibitive compensation to recruit and retain talent, and examine exceptions for higher competitive pay. — 648 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise 5. Assess the medical facilities where Community Care is readily available but referrals for Community Care are below the averages in other similar markets, referrals expiring are above the average, and/ or canceled appointments are above the average. Identify reasons and factors and consider possible ways to improve timeliness and responsiveness for veterans. 6. Further explore how to leverage telehealth to reduce personnel costs across the enterprise and serve veterans. Continue to pursue expansion of broadband services to remote and rural areas. 7. Assess recruitment and retention in highly competitive medical markets to identify common limiting factors for attracting high-demand, specialized occupations. 8. Consider aggressively recruiting retired physicians who desire to serve veterans. 9. Consider expanding VA tuition assistance in exchange for reciprocal service in rural or understaffed VAMCs. 10. Examine the surpluses or deficits in mental health professionals throughout the enterprise, recognizing that the department needs a blend of social workers, therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists with a focus on attracting high-quality talent. l Conduct a high-priority assessment of Electronic Health Record (EHR) transition delays and functionality problems. VA innovation in health care for the next 20 years and beyond will rest squarely on the timely implementation of the new VHA EHR in coordination with the DOD’s parallel pacing effort. The VA’s EHR rollout has been blocked by technical delays at local facilities where personnel have raised safety concerns and infrastructure has not been modernized to accept the new system. VETERANS BENEFITS ADMINISTRATION (VBA) Needed Reforms The most evident and ongoing concern is the complexity of benefits, which can lead to confusion for the veteran and, if not mitigated early in the veteran’s interactions, long-term distrust of and animosity toward the VA. Wholesale ben- efits reform is unnecessary and politically a “third rail,” but effective managerial
Showing 3 of 5 policy matches
About These Correlations
Policy matches are calculated using a hybrid approach: initial candidates are found using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text, then an AI model (Llama 3.1 70B) provides detailed alignment ratings and analysis. Ratings range from 1 (minimal alignment) to 5 (very strong alignment). This analysis does not imply direct causation or intent.