Honoring America's Veterans and Caring for Camp LeJeune Families Act of 2012

Floor Speech

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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, as chairman of the Committee on Veterans' Affairs, I am pleased to speak in support of the Honoring America's Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act of 2012.

I thank my colleagues from the Veterans' Committee for their continuous support of our Nation's veterans--especially my ranking member Senator
Burr of North Carolina, for his steadfast advocacy of the government's responsibility to provide health care for the veterans and family members stationed at Camp Lejeune.

In addition, I thank Representatives Jeff Miller and Bob Filner, the chairman and ranking Member of the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, for their hard work in developing this bipartisan, bicameral, and fully paid-for legislation.

With the passage of the Honoring America's Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act of 2012, military families affected by contaminated water at Camp Lejeune, NC, would have the health care they need.

These families have waited for decades to get the assistance they need, and they should not be forced to wait any longer.

The legislation would also allow the VA to continue a number of programs that are so critical to helping veterans who have no place to call home.

Currently, the VA can only provide emergency shelter to veterans who are diagnosed with a serious mental illness. But we all know not all homeless veterans are mentally ill. Yet the VA is currently prevented from offering these critical services to all our veterans.

The Honoring America's Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act of 2012 would also make much needed improvements to the VA's housing programs by expanding the eligibility for the VA's specially adapted housing assistance grants.

These are some of the most disabled veterans in our Nation, and they deserve to be able to move about in their homes freely and safely.

This bill will also help more veterans use telehealth and telemedicine and allow veterans to receive travel assistance for visits to our vet centers. These provisions will especially help our veterans in rural and highly rural areas to access care from the VA.

It will also improve the way the VA reimburses State veterans homes for the care of elderly, seriously disabled veterans.

I know every Member of the Senate has at least one State veterans home in their State. Without this change, some of these homes may have to lay off staffers or be unable to accept more veterans, so it is a very important provision of the bill.

This legislation will also require important policy changes to protect veterans from sexual assault and other threats in the VA's inpatient mental health units and homeless programs.

Finally, we all know veterans continue to find themselves waiting entirely too long for a decision on their claims. This legislation will address the claims backlog by providing the VA with the ability to process appeals much more quickly and by supporting the VA's transformation to a paperless system. It will also make other needed improvements to the claims system, such as ensuring surviving spouses receive proper and timely benefit payments.

Above all, this bill fulfill's the responsibility this Nation has to provide care and service to our veterans and their families. In the case of those families who spent time at Camp Lejeune, this bill gives sick veterans and their families the benefit of the doubt their illness or condition was caused by the water at Camp Lejeune so they can finally get the health care they need.

This is something Congress has done before. When an illness or condition comes about after a veteran's service and any relationship between the veteran's current illness and their service is not readily apparent, the burden of proving the illness is a result of one's service can be insurmountable. In such circumstances, we have presumed a veteran's exposure caused their current condition and got them the help they needed. We have lived up to the responsibility we owed them, which is in the core of this bill.

Many veterans and their families are waiting for the passage of this bill. Our House colleagues are ready and willing to move this forward quickly as well. We did have one concern from the Senator from South Carolina, Mr. DeMint. We had a very productive conversation, and we now have that language resolved and have had a gentleman's agreement to move the bill forward today.

I wish to thank the Senator from South Carolina for his work and effort to get this bill passed. I know our veterans and families across the Nation are waiting.

I thank all our colleagues who have worked so hard on this very critical piece of legislation.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the Joint Explanatory Statement in relation to this bill.

There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the RECORD,

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