Veterans Care

Floor Speech

VETERANS CARE -- (Senate - February 28, 2008)

Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, our service members in Iraq are fighting under incredibly stressful conditions each and every day. We are on the floor today talking about an Iraq resolution. We are focused on the war or the surge. I wish to talk today about the soldiers themselves who are called on. Many of them, as we know, have come home with terrible injuries that need specialized care. Yet there are too many examples that show today the Bush administration was caught unprepared to take care of these men and women when they have come home.

So as we continue to talk about Iraq, I think it is important we also talk about the toll that this war is taking on our troops and our veterans. I wish to focus today on the need to ensure that our injured service members and veterans can get the care they need and deserve by reminding all of us what happened in the last year and how much we still have to do.

A year ago this month, the Washington Post published a story that uncovered the depth of the problems facing our service members who were being treated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The Post reported then that service members were living in rooms with moldy walls and broken ceilings while they waited, waited to get care. The Post found that many of our service members and their families felt trapped at the time in a bureaucratic catch-22 as they fought to get the disability benefits they had earned.

The news of the extent of the squalid conditions was a watershed moment in the care of our military men and women.

It focused the attention of the American people on the needs and treatment of our injured service members and veterans. It put a spotlight on the frustrating redtape that was facing service members as they transitioned out of the military and into the VA.

I am very proud that Congress, led by the Democratic majority, moved quickly to investigate the problems, not just at Walter Reed but throughout the military and VA systems to take that action.

Shortly after the Washington Post story ran, the Democratic leaders went to Walter Reed and met with our injured service members. The Veterans' Affairs Committee and the Armed Services Committee joined in a historic partnership to address the problems we saw there and at military and VA facilities across the entire country.

Many of us have continued to go to Walter Reed and other facilities on a regular basis, as we had even before those stories ran. In fact, I was up at Walter Reed a short time ago to tour the mental health ward and learn about what efforts are being made to decrease the stigma attached to mental health care and to help improve care.

As a result of the action we took, our country has made a lot of changes in its care for our service members and our veterans. One of the most significant was the Wounded Warriors Act, which was included in last year's Defense authorization bill.

With the Wounded Warriors Act, we laid out a clear path, directing the Defense Department and the VA to address the shortfalls in the care of our injured service members. So a year after the Walter Reed report, we required the Defense Department and the VA to work together to develop a comprehensive plan to prevent, treat, and diagnose traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress syndrome, and we directed the Defense Department to create Centers of Excellence for TBI and PTSD to improve our understanding of these devastating injuries that were impacting our soldiers.

We are addressing the frustrating bureaucracy with which our troops have struggled. We have now directed the VA and the Defense Department to develop a joint electronic health care record. And we are requiring the military and the VA to work together, finally, on disability ratings.

The Defense Department is investing in new technology, more equipment, and state-of-the-art treatment to better care for injured soldiers. Walter Reed and facilities across the entire country are making similar improvements. In fact, in my home State of Washington, Fort Lewis has taken great strides in its treatment of wounded service members who are recovering there. In one example, leaders there are working very hard now to help our service members and, critically, their families understand the benefits available to them.

I am optimistic the action we took is changing the way our military and the VA operates. But as I stand on the floor today, I must tell you we have a lot of work left to be done. Yesterday, the GAO reported to Congress the Army has significantly improved its support for service members at Walter Reed and our military hospitals.

According to the Washington Post this morning, there is an article today: Army officials say they have transformed the way they care for soldiers and their families.

But the GAO also said, as has been reported this morning, there are still shortages of staff and other gaps we have to address. In fact, one-third of warrior transition units are still understaffed. And that, to me, raises concerns about the progress of a streamlined disability ranking system.

We still have a long ways to go to provide our service members with the care they deserve. And some of these changes are actually going to require a cultural transformation within the military.

We have to keep our eye on the ball.

I got a personal reminder of this when I reconnected recently with Army retired SPC Rory Dunn. He is an amazing young man who comes from my home State and lives in Renton, WA. Rory was horribly injured when his humvee was hit by a roadside bomb outside Fallujah in 2004. When I first saw Rory, he was in front of me with his entire skull crushed in, his head crushed from ear to ear. He lost an eye. He lost his sense of smell. He lost much of his hearing. He still today, in fact, has shrapnel in his brain. Rory, sitting in front of me, had visibly sacrificed for our country, nearly losing his life several times as he was moved from Fallujah to Germany and finally to Walter Reed. When he got to the United States, he was sent to Walter Reed, and there the Army tried to discharge him before he completely had recovered.

He and his mother have struggled to help make sure he gets the benefits he needs, not just that, the lack of medical care as he progressed. When I saw Rory at one time he was excited. He was being sent to Richmond, VA polytrauma center for treatment. Recently he told me about the horrific experience he had there. I hope much has improved since then, but he told me at the time, even though he could not get out of bed because of the tremendous extent of his injuries, he would wake up in the morning, ring his call bell, which apparently was not plugged in, and wait for a nurse to come and help him with basic restroom needs. No one came for hours. Rory was left there. A soldier who fought for his country in the Iraq war, had done everything his country asked of him, injured horribly, was left to sit in his own waste in a polytrauma center in Virginia.

Thankfully we have come a long way from there. Rory should never have had to go through that.

He was then sent on to Palo Alto for reconstructive surgery. They did an amazing job. In fact, when I first talked to Rory after his injuries, he asked me to pin his Purple Heart on him when he was awarded that. But he wanted to wait until he had his face reconstructed because he wanted the picture to look good. So he had to wait many months before I finally met him in Seattle and was so proud to pin that on his chest as his mother sat and watched with tears running down her face.

That was several years ago. Rory has continued to struggle every single day, a young man, barely out of his teenage years, injured dramatically in the war in Iraq, 4 years later, still struggling to do everything he can to be an American. What is Rory doing with his time? He and his mother, who has now spent 4 years helping Rory recover, are back at Walter Reed and other VA facilities to make sure no soldier goes through what Rory did, advocating for them, making sure they understand what they need, making sure they get the help and support and, importantly, making sure I continue to understand what is happening in the military in our VA system and making sure that no soldier goes through what he did when he came home. Rory told me a few weeks ago: There is much work left to be done. He still talks to soldiers who have been left behind, who are not getting the help they need, who feel like second-class citizens, who feel they are still fighting their Government when they come home.

For me, Rory is the face of this war. I think we have to ensure that the changes we are making to improve the conditions for all of our service members and veterans such as Rory are not a flurry of action while the cameras are rolling. We have to work to ensure that action doesn't drop off once the media has moved on to the next story. I remain firmly convinced that we have to remain vigilant on three specific fronts if we are going to talk about real change for our troops and our veterans. I believe, first, we have to ensure that we cut through the bureaucracy between the military and the VA. It is simply unacceptable that after fighting for our country, our service members have had to return and fight against the Government for the care they deserve. It isn't only from this war. Go back and talk to Vietnam-era, Korean-era veterans who have been fighting for years to get the disability benefits they deserve.

Thanks to the Wounded Warrior Act, we have now started a pilot project to work out ways to make the Defense Department and the VA disability rating systems compatible so our soldiers do not face this, but we do have to remember, this is the first step between bridging the gap between the VA and the Defense Department. It is only a pilot. We have a lot more work we need to do to ensure that those agencies don't do a pilot project and put it on the shelf; that they look at how it is working, what is working, what is not, what are the challenges in front of us, are we making sure that we stay on them every day. Congress has to keep a close watch to make sure this isn't because the cameras were rolling a year ago or today but something that is effective far into the future. We have to work to make sure they meet those goals.

Secondly, we have to focus our attention on treating the new injuries to our service members who are suffering in Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly traumatic brain injury. TBI is a significant wound of this war, but we have only just begun to understand how we treat it. We have to recognize that whenever there is an explosion in Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever we have soldiers on the ground, the effects of that, not just on the soldiers in the vehicle but even those close by and sometimes hundreds of yards away, can have a damaging impact on the brain, called traumatic brain injury. We still don't know all we need to about how to treat TBI, and we still have soldiers coming home every day, every month who have just been diagnosed with TBI or perhaps not diagnosed, and we need to make sure they get the correct diagnosis and treatment.

Congress has authorized millions of new dollars for research, but we have to ensure that we get the results from that research. Then we have to make sure we take action based on what we have learned.

I am extremely disappointed that the President seems to have lost sight of that already. He has proposed to this Congress an 8-percent cut for VA medical and prosthetic research in his fiscal year 2009 budget. That is incredibly shortsighted, and he can be sure--and every Member of this body can be sure--I am going to fight that every step of the way. We need to find out how to better treat TBI, how to diagnosis it, how to deal with PTSD and how to diagnose and treat it effectively. That takes research, and we have to stay on top of it.

Finally, and most difficult, we have to change a military culture in which service members are told that mental illness is an excuse for their pain and which fails to recognize that psychological wounds can be more serious

than some of their physical injuries. Congress again has given the military hundreds of millions of dollars to improve its mental health care system. We have pushed through legislation this past year requiring the military and the VA to destigmatize mental health treatment, to increase awareness of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome, and to do further research on traumatic brain injury. But recent reports show that the Army's suicide prevention efforts need a lot more work. The numbers of suicides have risen since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, and last year as many as 121 soldiers committed suicide. That is a 20-percent increase over the year before.

I was struck by a recent report by the Associated Press which was a stark reminder of how serious this issue is. That article reported on a VA study which found that more than half of the veterans who took their own lives from 2001 to 2005 were members of the National Guard or Reserve, even though the Guard and Reserve have made up less than a third of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Prolonged deployments are stretching our troops to the breaking point. Earlier this week General Casey acknowledged his concern about the strain on the military. He told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Army is under so much stress from extended deployments that we must reduce the length of combat tours as soon as possible. Many of our service members have seen their best friends killed. They have seen other untold horrors. Yet somehow we expect them to come back from the battlefield, come back home unaffected by what they have seen, or their experience. We have to ensure that the military takes action to ensure that our troops are getting the psychological care they need. We need to see a change in the culture. That change has to be more than a talking point. Senior military leaders have pledged to do more, but they have to ensure that their words and their programs are being executed in the field. They have to work to break down the stigma that is, unfortunately, associated with seeking mental health treatment. They have to ensure that troops have psychiatrists and psychologists to talk to, and they have to ensure that those who seek help aren't then penalized. We have to find ways to reach out to service members who are discharged and are not seeking care from the VA. This is especially important for our Guard and Reserves who oftentimes, when they come home, don't think of themselves as veterans. They return from the war and go back to their civilian jobs without ever getting help.

In my State of Washington, over 10,200 Guard and Reserve members have now served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our troops and veterans are heroes who are sacrificing for our Nation. It is time for our Government to wake up and provide them with the care they need.

I voted against going to war in Iraq. But I have said consistently that no matter how anyone feels about the war, we have an obligation as leaders to make sure our men and women who fight for us get the care they deserve. I am proud of the way this Congress, led by the Democratic majority, moved to address the problems facing our returning service members, which clearly wasn't a priority for the Bush administration. Here in Congress, we said: Not on our watch, not anymore.

A year after the Walter Reed story drew attention to the treatment of service members, we have made progress. But we cannot let this issue fade away. After examining the President's VA budget proposal, I have to tell my colleagues, I am disappointed that the administration still doesn't seem to get it. In his State of the Union Address this year, President Bush said he was dedicated to providing for our Nation's veterans. But at a time when thousands of new veterans are entering the VA system with serious medical needs as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the administration is underestimating the cost of medical care and is cutting funding for construction and medical and prosthetic research. At a time when our older veterans are seeking care in record numbers, the President is proposing fees for them and copays that are essentially going to shut the door of the VA to thousands of people who served our country. That is wrong. I am going to be working very hard this year to ensure that those misguided proposals do not become reality.

The same is true as we address the budget for caring for our troops. Our service members risk their lives for our security every single day. They have done everything we have asked. We have to live up to our commitment to them.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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