Caregivers And Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act Of 2009

Floor Speech

CAREGIVERS AND VETERANS OMNIBUS HEALTH SERVICES ACT OF 2009 -- (Senate - November 19, 2009)

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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, last week many of us spent time back home celebrating our veterans and honoring the great sacrifices they made for our country. I had the opportunity to commemorate Veterans Day at the Tahoma National Cemetery in Kent, WA. It was truly an honor to stand with veterans and their families as we paid tribute to their service.

This recognition is important, it is certainly deserved, but it is not enough. We owe it to our veterans to make sure our commitment to them extends beyond Veterans Day and that they have access to the health care and services they have earned.

Growing up, I saw firsthand the many ways that military service can affect both veterans and their families. My father served in World War II. He was one of the first soldiers to land in Okinawa. He came home as a disabled veteran, and he was awarded the Purple Heart.

Like many soldiers of his generation, my dad did not talk about his experiences to us when he came home. In fact, we only learned about them by reading his journals after he passed away. That experience offered me a much larger lesson about veterans in general.

They are reluctant to call attention to their service. They are reluctant to ask for help. That is why we have to publicly recognize their sacrifices and contributions. It is up to us to make sure they get the recognition they have earned. Our veterans held up their end of the deal, now we have to hold up ours.

As a member of the Veterans' Affairs Committee, I am keenly aware that we have a lot of work to do for the men and women who served us. Not only must we continually strive to keep up our commitments to veterans from all wars, but we have to also respond to the new and very different issues facing veterans who are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan today, wars that are being fought under conditions that are very different from those in the past. That is precisely what the caregivers and veterans omnibus health bill that is before us today aims to do.

One of the changes we have seen in our veterans population recently is the growing number of women veterans who are seeking care at the VA. Today more women are serving in the military than ever before, and over the next 5 years, in fact, the number of women seeking care at the VA is expected to double. Not only are women answering the call to serve at unprecedented levels, they are also serving in a very different capacity.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, we have seen wars that do not have traditional front lines; therefore, all of our servicemembers, including women, find themselves on the front lines. So whether it is working at the check points or helping to search and clear neighborhoods or supporting supply convoys, women servicemembers face many of the same risks from IEDs and ambushes as their male counterparts.

But while the nature of their service has changed, the VA has been very slow to change the nature of the care they provide for these women when they return home. Today at the VA there is an insufficient number of doctors and staff with specific training and experience in women's health issues, and even the VA's own special studies have shown that women veterans are underserved. That is why included in this veterans health bill we are talking about today is a bill I introduced that will enable the VA to better understand and ultimately treat the unique needs of our female veterans. That bill authorizes several new programs and studies, including a comprehensive look at the barriers women currently face in accessing care through the VA. It is a study of women who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan to assess how those conflicts have affected their health.

There is a requirement that the VA implement a program to train and educate and certify VA mental health professionals to care for women with sexual trauma, and there is a pilot program that provides childcare to women veterans who are seeking mental health services at the VA.

This bill is the result of many discussions with women veterans on the unique and very personal problems they face when they return from war. Oftentimes after veterans meetings I held in which male veterans would speak freely about where they believed the VA wasn't meeting their needs, women veterans would approach me afterwards and walk up to me very quietly and whisper about the challenges they face.

Some of these women told me they don't view themselves as a veteran even though they served, and therefore they don't seek care at the VA. Others told me how they believed the lack of privacy at their local VA was very intimidating, or about being forced into a caregiving role that prevented them from seeking care as they would often have to struggle to find a babysitter just in order to keep an appointment. To me and to the bipartisan group of Senators who have cosponsored my women veterans bill, these barriers to care for women veterans were unacceptable.

As more women now begin to transition back home and step back into careers and their lives as moms and wives, the VA has to be there for them. This bill we are talking about today will help the VA modernize to meet their needs.

Another way this bill meets the changing needs of our veterans is in the area of assisting caregivers in the home. As we have all seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, medical advances have helped save the lives of servicemembers who, as we know, in previous conflicts would have perished from the severity of their wounds. But these modern miracles also mean many of those who have been cast catastrophically wounded need round-the-clock care when they come home. In many of our rural areas, where access to health care services is limited, the burden of providing care often falls on the families of those severely injured veterans.

For these family members, providing care for their loved ones becomes a full-time job. Oftentimes we hear they have to quit their current job, forfeiting not only their source of income but often their own health care insurance as well. That is a sacrifice that is far too great, especially for families who have already sacrificed so much. That is why this underlying bill provides those caregivers with health care, with counseling, with support, and, importantly, a stipend.

This bill also takes steps to provide dental insurance to our veterans and survivors and their dependents.

It improves mental health care services and eases the transition from active duty to civilian life. It expands outreach and technology to provide better care to veterans who live in rural areas. It initiates three programs to address homelessness among veterans at these especially difficult economic times.

This is a bill that is supported by numerous veterans service organizations, by the VA, and it is supported by many leading medical groups. It was passed in the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee with broad bipartisan support, after hearings with health care experts and VA officials and veterans and their families. Like other omnibus veterans health care bills before us, bills that have often passed on the floor with overwhelming support, it puts veterans before politics. It is a bipartisan bill designed to move swiftly so its programs can be implemented swiftly. It is a bipartisan bill designed to make sure our veterans do not become political pawns. Yet we have faced a lot of delays in getting here. Those delays are all too common here in the Senate. We have seen bipartisan nominations stalled, funding bills slowed down to a crawl. It has taken us months to pass a simple extension of unemployment benefits for people who are out of work.

Providing for our veterans used to be one area where political affiliation and bipartisan bickering fell to the wayside. I hope those days are not behind us. Our aging veterans and the brave men and women who serve in Iraq and Afghanistan need our help now. How we treat them at this critical time is going to send a signal to a generation of young people who today might be considering military service.

As I have said many times, it is so important that we keep our promise to veterans, the same promise Abraham Lincoln made to America's veterans 140 years ago, ``to care for the veteran who has borne in battle, his widow and his orphan.''

Our veterans have waited long enough for many of the improvements in this bill. We cannot ask them to wait any longer.

I spoke last week on the floor on the eve of Veterans Day urging colleagues to move quickly on this bill. I am so glad progress is now being made toward making that happen. As we wait to pass this bill, our promise goes unfulfilled to many of our Nation's heroes. I urge my colleagues to pass this bill quickly so we can get to the work of providing our veterans with the support and services they have earned.

I thank the Chair.

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