Empower CEO presses Congress on veterans' behavioral health care

Empower founder and CEO Yisroel Loeb met with Speaker Mike Johnson and other leaders on Capitol Hill to push for stronger behavioral health care and disability evaluations for veterans. The pitch centers on more specialist care, more flexible capacity, and tighter accountability for complex cases.

Why it matters: - Veterans with complex behavioral health conditions often face the highest-stakes disability evaluations, and quality failures can affect benefits, care access and long-term outcomes. - The U.S. Government Accountability Office says about nine in 10 disability-rating exams are now done by contractors, not the Department of Veterans Affairs. - Federal oversight has identified the deepest quality gaps in examinations for post-traumatic stress disorder, military sexual trauma, traumatic brain injury and Gulf War Illness.

What happened: - Yisroel Loeb, PhD, founder and CEO of Empower, met on Capitol Hill with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Rep. Abe Hamadeh of Arizona's 8th Congressional District and other national leaders focused on veterans' health. - The discussion centered on how Congress and clinician-led organizations can work together to strengthen behavioral health care and disability evaluation services for veterans. - Loeb urged the Speaker's office to ensure veterans with complex conditions get specialists, capacity and accountability.

The details: - Loeb laid out three principles for veterans' behavioral health care. - Complex evaluations and treatment should be handled by clinicians who specialize in those conditions and work under named clinical leadership. - Veterans in rural and underserved communities should not wait longer than veterans in major metropolitan areas. - Organizations that recruit, credential and clinically support their own providers can shift coverage by state, specialty and examination type as demand changes. - Examiners and treating providers should be able to raise concerns directly with quality leaders, and the Department of Veterans Affairs should be able to reach the clinical leader accountable for any report. - The U.S. Government Accountability Office has recommended a direct examiner feedback channel, and Empower supports that recommendation. - Loeb said Empower supports evaluations for more than 4,000 veterans a month in all 50 states. - Loeb said he has personally worked with more than 6,000 veterans over his career.

Between the lines: - The message from Empower is that veterans' care problems are not just about volume. They are about clinical depth, supervision and clear accountability. - The company's model is built around recruiting, credentialing and clinically supporting its own clinicians rather than treating clinician development as a side benefit. - That approach is meant to make capacity more flexible while keeping oversight closer to the examiners doing the work. - Loeb said he came to Washington to argue that the system should expect that standard from every organization serving veterans, including Empower.

What's next: - Empower said it intends to keep pressing the case in Washington for veterans who need the most complex care. - The company's national network of licensed psychologists and medical providers will continue supporting disability evaluations across all 50 states. - Empower is also continuing psychological evaluation, trauma-informed treatment and care coordination services for people recovering from injury, along with behavioral health services for injured workers returning to function.

The bottom line: - Empower is using its Capitol Hill meeting to argue that veterans' behavioral health care should be judged by specialist depth, scalable capacity and direct clinical accountability, not just by how many exams get done.