The commonwealth is home to nearly 700,000 veterans, the fifth highest veteran population in the country.

In a mental health crisis, you don’t always have the luxury of time. Getting mental health care requires finding a provider, identifying causes, addressing symptoms, creating a treatment plan, and working through the long and nonlinear journey of improving mental health.

That slow process is all happening while your mind is at war with itself.

Now imagine your options are limited to just one medical center. There’s no shopping around for the best therapy options or the provider you can get an appointment with the quickest. There is one provider, and you just have to get in line and wait your turn.

That’s not a hypothetical situation; it’s the experience of millions of veterans, including me, who use the Department of Veterans Affairs for their medical care.

And it’s not far from home either.

Pennsylvania is home to nearly 700,000 veterans, the fifth highest veteran population in the country. These are our friends and neighbors, members of our communities that need access to care.

If lawmakers ignore significant flaws in the delivery of care, veterans like me will continue to struggle with our mental health care.

I was a firefighter in the United States Air Force, a job that took me on several deployments to Latin America in the late 1980s. During one of those deployments, I was in a serious crash, sustaining injuries that still plague me to this day.

As many veterans will tell you, these traumatic events stay with us, even when we work to address our mental health.

I’ve tried to do just that in the last decade – confront the trauma and work on improving my mental health. But the VA hasn’t made it easy. I’ve lost track of how many therapists or psychiatrists I’ve met with. Every new provider means starting over from scratch, retelling and reliving traumatic experiences. And the wait times for care vary wildly depending on the individual facility.

The care we get at the VA is often inconsistent and hard to anticipate.

When veterans face extended wait times, long drive times, or inadequate care at the VA we have the Community Care Program. This program allows veterans to use their VA health benefits to seek care from a provider of their choice outside the VA.

But a large bureaucracy like the VA wants to keep veterans at its facilities rather than trying all options.

For years, VA has manipulated regulations so that fewer veterans are eligible for community care. Loopholes and vague, broad language in the law keep the VA at the center of care and leave veterans without real options.

That’s not how this should go. Veterans should be at the center of care at the VA.

This is a fixable problem for Congress. The Veterans’ ACCESS Act would make accessing and scheduling appointments through community care much easier for veterans like me. It would write criteria for using community care into law so that veterans have certainty about our eligibility. It would also set up accountability measures for the VA to more accurately report wait times for appointments.

What I’m most excited about is how much the Veterans’ ACCESS Act will put care in veterans’ hands.

It would require the VA to build a self-scheduling portal so veterans can schedule their own medical appointments, either at VA or in community care. And it would create a “full choice” pilot program, allowing veterans struggling with mental health to get community care on their terms.

No waiting for a VA referral or the VA acting as a gatekeeper at all – just veterans able to choose when and where we get our mental health care.

These could be lifesaving measures. A recent report shows Pennsylvania had the fourth highest number of veteran suicides in the country ― which comes out, on average, to about one nearly every, single day. We can’t afford rigid, bureaucratic care, especially in our state with so many rural communities with less access to VA facilities.

I’ve worked with some truly wonderful mental health professionals at the VA. But I’m at a point now where I need something more than the VA can provide. So many veterans in my community and across the country are in the same boat.

All we want is to be treated with dignity and respect, starting with being more in control of our own health care. At its core, that’s what the Veterans’ ACCESS Act does; it puts veterans at the center of care and treats us as individuals with unique needs, not just numbers in a giant system.

If VA facilities work for us, great. If they don’t, community care should be an available, accessible option.

It’s important for our members of Congress here in Pennsylvania to be champions for veterans. The Veterans’ ACCESS Act can put veterans like me back at the center of care.

Joe Steber is the Pennsylvania strategic director for Concerned Veterans for America and a veteran of the United States Air Force.

Read Joe’s full op-ed on the Pennsylvania Capitol-Star.