Providing Certain Burial Benefits for Spouses and Children of Veterans Who Are Buried in Tribal Cemeteries

Floor Speech

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Mr. BERGMAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Chairman Roe and Chairman Isakson for their leadership throughout the 115th Congress in a bipartisan, bicameral way for putting together one last package of veterans priority bills.

To be able to sponsor any bill is a privilege, but to be able to sponsor a veteran-related bill is both an honor and a privilege.

I want to talk just very quickly about a couple of bills that I was proud to sponsor. The VA Purchase Card Misuse Mitigation Act: The VA has been able to use purchase cards for up to $10,000 using government cards. This act basically allows them to continue to do that, but also allows the Secretary of the VA to revoke purchase card approval authority from any employee who is found to be misusing that card.

As chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, transparency and accountability have been my priorities, and this bill will keep bad actors in check while making the VA more efficient.

The second bill I was proud to sponsor is the Medical-Surgical Purchasing Stabilization Act. In pure and simple terms, going to a prime vendor program in med-surge purchasing was a good idea to control costs and increase patient outcomes. However, we need to ensure that the providers, the doctors and the nurses who are actually using those instruments in surgery or in the clinic, have a say in what is being purchased, because the goal is to provide outcomes for the veteran, and those healthcare providers know which instruments are the best to use.

Lastly, the Veterans' Electronic Health Record Modernization Act, which we have already talked about here, this is key to providing seamless care from the veterans beginning of their service to the end of their service. This is overdue, and it needs to be monitored, it needs to be assessed so that we, as the committee, in a bipartisan way can make it happen.

Mr. Speaker, in closing, I am extremely proud of the bipartisan work and I am looking forward to the 116th Congress.

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