Ground broken for joint military-VA 'Super Clinic'

The $48-million facility in the Panhandle will be a first, treating both active military and veterans.

PENSACOLA - Former Army tank crew member R.C. Acosta will be able to stop monthly round trips of up to 400 miles to get treatment for his hearing loss when the nation's first "Super Clinic" for veterans and active-duty military personnel opens here in two years.

Veterans Affairs Secretary James Nicholson, U.S. Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Chumuckla, and Navy officials wielded shovels at a groundbreaking ceremony Monday for the $48-million Joint Ambulatory Care Clinic, a partnership between the Department of Veterans Affairs and Defense Department.

It will be built and operated by the VA at Corry Station, a Navy base that provides code and electronic warfare training for all military branches. The clinic will serve troops at Corry and their dependents as well as veterans and military retirees from communities in the Florida Panhandle and southern Alabama.

Nicholson said the clinic, which will replace a smaller stand-alone VA facility, is a model of how his department and the military can avoid duplication, improve health care and save taxpayer money.

"The hope is we can replicate this when appropriate," he later told reporters.

A smaller joint clinic is planned for next year at Eglin Air Force Base, which is also in Miller's district. More than 100,000 veterans live in his district but are without a local VA hospital.

Acosta, 56, has been driving to Mississippi and Louisiana for seven years because the existing Pensacola clinic lacks the specialists he needs for his service-connected hearing loss. The Super Clinic will have them, but it will be even more important to many other Panhandle veterans, Acosta said.

The drive is particularly difficult for aging World War II and Korean War veterans and some younger ones who were seriously wounded in Iraq, he said.

"It's a real, real stressful hardship to make them go to New Orleans VA and Biloxi VA," Acosta said.

Acosta founded a group, Veterans in Politics, to lobby for a VA hospital in the Panhandle, but that is unlikely to happen.

One reason is the VA contracts with civilian hospitals in the area and about four years ago obtained an agreement to use the Pensacola Navy Hospital, next to Corry Station, for in-patient services if space and specialties are available.

Officials said joint clinics could help expand the hospital partnership here and in other military communities. That may make VA hospitals here unnecessary.

"Instead of investing $400-million for a hospital, why not speed the process up?" said Miller. "A hospital is counterproductive when you look at the excess (civilian and military) bed capacity in Northwest Florida."

[Last modified May 10, 2005, 01:02:19]