Senator Elizabeth Dole 21st Century Veterans Healthcare and Benefits Improvement Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. TAKANO. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Madam Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 8371, as amended, the Senator Elizabeth Dole 21st Century Veterans Healthcare and Benefits Improvement Act.
This omnibus package of veterans' legislation isn't perfect; such packages rarely are. However, it achieves progress on many of the goals we set out to accomplish at the beginning of the 118th Congress.
The backbone of this bill is legislation that was originally introduced by my colleague, Julia Brownley, the ranking member of the House Veterans' Affairs Subcommittee on Health.
Representative Brownley has worked tirelessly for nearly 3 years to pass the Elizabeth Dole Home Care Act, H.R. 542. This bill will enable veterans to remain at home, safely age in place, and avoid or delay admission to nursing homes and other costly institutional settings of care by expanding veterans' access to home- and community-based services such as home health aides.
This legislation will also help connect veterans' caregivers to respite care and other support services that help them care for veterans at home. Further, it will help improve VA's coordination with other Federal long-term care programs that promote aging at home.
I am very thankful to my colleague Julia Brownley for her important work, but I know she worked very closely with Senator Elizabeth Dole, and Senator Dole has risen to an amazing stature in our country. I am so proud that she is also here in this Chamber with us today as the chairman mentioned. I hope someone will get her a blanket because it is so dang cold in this Chamber that I don't want her to freeze up there.
This legislation is an investment in care for millions of veterans and current servicemembers who need this help now and in the future.
Despite the great need for this bill, it has been an uphill battle to get it passed. This Chamber had an opportunity almost a year ago to pass the Elizabeth Dole Home Care Act as a stand-alone bill. Unfortunately, House Republicans decided to bring a version to the floor they knew the Senate wouldn't pass.
Why would they do that you may ask? Well, because they decided to hold the Elizabeth Dole Home Care Act and other bipartisan policy priorities hostage, attempting to use them as leverage to achieve their goal of outsourcing more VA care to for-profit healthcare providers. The Democratic Caucus stood firmly against these efforts.
It can be difficult and isolating to stand on policy principles, but I will always do so when the future of veterans' healthcare is on the line, and it is. The system is already straining, and if we don't take real and serious action, it will break.
House Republicans attempted nearly for a year to use H.R. 8371 to advance harmful provisions that would have undermined healthcare directly provided by VA, driving veterans to for-profit, lower-quality care from contracted providers. We want VA to remain a strong provider of care instead of diminishing it to nothing more than an insurance company where profits are prioritized over outcomes for veterans.
Madam Speaker, if we have learned anything during the 118th Congress, it is that anything meaningful that we have accomplished has been done on a bipartisan basis with Democratic votes.
It should never have taken this long to get here, but last week, we successfully negotiated a compromise on the most objectionable provision of H.R. 8371, which will preserve VA healthcare for current and future generations of veterans.
Unfortunately, in the year it took to get to this point, House Republicans also held hostage critical legislation to help homeless veterans. In December 2023, my colleagues in the majority knowingly and intentionally took a flawed version of the HOME Act, which includes two Democratic-led bills to the House floor to use these provisions as leverage in negotiations for this package. They used homeless veterans as political pawns in the same way that they did with elderly and disabled veterans and their caregivers.
Meanwhile, VA and its community partners continued doing the hard work to help veterans experiencing homelessness. On Veterans Day, the VA announced that veteran homelessness dropped to its lowest level on record, and that VA had helped place nearly 48,000 veterans into permanent housing in 2024.
While I celebrate VA's success in addressing this issue, there are still nearly 300,000 veterans who interact with VA's homelessness programs each year. We must continue investing resources into these programs and into our communities to ensure that every veteran has a stable place to call home. We hope the next administration will continue this work and adhere to the models that have proven effective like Housing First.
Therefore, the second pillar of this legislation supports our shared goal of ending veteran homelessness. H.R. 8371 includes provisions from Congresswoman Williams' H.R. 491, the Return Home to Housing Act and Congresswoman Cherfilus-McCormick's H.R. 645, the Healthy Foundations for Homeless Veterans Act. These provisions will provide direct investments in communities across the country as they move veterans from the streets into stable housing.
During the pandemic, VA used authorities contained in Representative Williams' bill to enhance the services that traditional housing providers could offer to veterans through an increased per diem reimbursement rate. It used the flexible authorities in Representative Cherfilus-McCormick's bill to save lives by bringing veterans out of unsafe living conditions into stable, permanent housing and meeting their basic needs of food, shelter, and clothing.
It also ensured homeless veterans had the transportation needed to get to and from medical appointments and job interviews.
These long overdue reauthorizations will ensure VA and its community partners can continue to address the veteran homelessness crisis in this country with the urgency and focus it deserves.
There is still more work to do to get every veteran into housing, and I look forward to working with my colleagues in Congress to provide VA, HUD, and communities across the country the support they need to end veteran homelessness.
Madam Speaker, I will also acknowledge several Democratic Members who have contributed to the drafting of this package. Representatives Mike Levin, Don Davis, Elissa Slotkin, Frank Mrvan, Dean Phillips, Morgan McGarvey, Chris Pappas, and Lauren Underwood all have provisions in their own bills included in this package. Many of them are or have been members of our committee, and their commitment to serving veterans continues with our work here today.
Among other things, these provisions will increase outreach to veterans about their eligibility for benefits, mandate training for VA employees on reporting wrongdoing to the inspector general, and remove statutory restrictions on the qualifications of senior leaders within the Veterans Health Administration.
Madam Speaker, that does not mean this bill is perfect, and I will stress my objection, once again, to the backward practice of the majority to offset discretionary spending along with mandatory spending in every bill. This means taxpayers will be paying for these programs twice and many remaining legislative priorities from the VSOs who are with us here today are at risk of being left undone next Congress when we must unnecessarily waste our limited offsets in order to advance this legislation.
Also missing from this package is a strong piece of bipartisan, bicameral, good-government legislation that would have installed much- needed guardrails on VA's electronic health record modernization project.
It is no secret that the Oracle-driven modernization effort has struggled at VA. The program is woefully behind schedule and is only operational at 6 of 172 medical centers. I am not convinced the system is fully functional. The EHR Program RESET Act would have required minimum operational criteria to be met before Oracle could be deployed to any further facilities, which would have prevented many of the current problems.
Further, this key legislation would have improved coordination with the Department of Defense and instituted major contracting and acquisition reforms over VA's IT modernization efforts that are long overdue.
Unfortunately, RESET was stripped from the package, which is not surprising given the army of lobbyists that Oracle unleashed to kill it.
That said, I thank the Veterans Service Organization community and other stakeholders whose tireless efforts and refusal to compromise their values proved critical in finally getting our Republican majority back to the negotiating table to reach a compromise on H.R. 8371 last week.
As we saw with the passage of the PACT Act, we know good things can be accomplished when VSOs are unified and committed to doing the right thing. I am glad that House Democrats also held firm to our values in negotiations and fought to preserve VA healthcare for current and future generations of veterans.
This package has taken more than a year to get to the finish line, but I am pleased that we as a caucus will be able to support passage on this compromise today.
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Mr. TAKANO. Madam Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Brownley), my good friend and the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Health.
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Mr. TAKANO.
Mr. DAVIS of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 8371, the Senator Elizabeth Dole 21st Century Veterans Healthcare and Benefits Improvement Act, which, among several provisions, includes the Veteran Caregiver Application and Appeals Reform Act of 2023.
As we recognize National Veterans and Military Families Month and National Family Caregivers Month, we must recommit ourselves to helping our Nation's veterans and their caregivers, often the unsung heroes of the healthcare system. Support of the CARE Act does exactly that. We must always lend a helping hand to our veterans and their families. I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 8371.
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Mr. TAKANO. Madam Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time to close.
I have said as much as I can about this important piece of legislation. What I will finally say is I am very glad that we got here, and I thank the chairman. We spent all this time, and we have reached a compromise. That is what we have to do in Congress, put our veterans and the people first. I think the American people want to see more of this sort of thing happening.
Madam Speaker, I am very pleased that we could get this done before the Thanksgiving weekend.
I urge all of my colleagues to support H.R. 8371, the Senator Elizabeth Dole 21st Century Veterans Healthcare and Benefits Improvement Act, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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