VA Accountability First and Appeals Modernization Act of 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, to our friends on the other side, I will let you know, I am going to move to withdraw the amendment, but I do want to share a little bit of an explanation of why I am taking this approach.

I am blessed to represent much of the Phoenix area, the epicenter of where the calendar, where the scheduling system was manipulated. For those of us who are in this body who have had the opportunity to sit across from a widow who cannot stop crying because she is telling you that, in everything she believes, the VA took the life of her husband by the delays, after the delays, after functionally being lied to and the delays.

I accept in this body I may be bordering on being sort of a techno- utopian, but I have a belief that there is technology out there that is already widely adopted in the rest of the world. I mean, there are countries that the entire nation's database system is run this way, something called a distributive ledger, a blockchain.

The beauty of what we were trying to weave into this is the concept of, hey, they are already working on a scheduling software. If you enable it across the server network, no one can manipulate it. You can't sit there and slip in and change the dates and the times without it being date-stamped. That is the beauty of a distributive ledger model, and you don't have to custom design the software to do this. Basically, you are already using the capital you have already spent on the series of servers you have, and then it distributes it across it.

This is today's technology--in a world where we step up and say we are going to custom-design a software solution for scheduling, that is brilliant if it were still the 1990s; it is not--our ability to use a type of technology where the veteran can log in through secure passwords, see their own records, see their history, see their schedules, and know that it is bulletproof, that no one can manipulate it; and if there was a change, they can see when and who did it, and they get to participate in the scheduling of their own health care. This will work on apps. It will work on a home computer. It will work on the servers at the VA.

I have to reach out and say thank you to the chairman and to his staff because I know some of this is new technology, and rolling it out in a very specific fashion is sort of disharmonious when you are moving forward with a reform bill of this nature, but I am hopeful that many of us are going to sell you the idea that there is little technological improvements that can be woven in and actually solve many of the structural problems, crises, concerns that all of us have had to face at the VA over the last few years.

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