Making Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for the Fiscal Year Ending September 30, 2014 - Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I rise today in strong support of the VA conference committee report, which I expect and hope will be on the floor here in a couple of hours. That conference committee report was passed yesterday by the House with an overwhelming vote of 420 to 5, and I hope very much our vote here in the Senate will be as strong as the vote in the House.

The conference committee legislation that we will be voting on, frankly, is certainly not the legislation I would have written.

I think it is fair to say it is not the legislation that the chairman of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, Jeff Miller, would have written; it is, in fact, a compromise, but it is a compromise I can strongly support, and I hope all of my Senate colleagues will support it as well.

This bill does a number of very important things to address the problems facing the veterans of our country. Right now veterans in many parts of this country are on very long waiting lists before they get VA health care. I think in the last month or so the VA has made a concerted effort to reach out to those veterans and to get them care when necessary in the private sector, and I think Acting Secretary Sloan Gibson did a good job in jump-starting that process and saying to veterans we are going to do everything we can to get them quality care in a timely manner. Obviously, this is an expensive proposition, but it is one we have to address.

This legislation we will be voting on in a few hours provides $10 billion to make sure every eligible veteran in this country will get timely health care, quality health care, and they will do that through the private sector, through community health centers, through Department of Defense facilities, and Indian Health Service Clinics when those facilities work for veterans. If there is a community health center in a community, the veteran can go in there and the VA will pay that bill. That is the effort we are making to significantly reduce these long waiting lines.

This bill also provides a remedy for a condition many of us consider to be terribly important, and that is it gets to the root of why it is that we have long waiting periods in many VA facilities around the country. The reality is that in the last 4 or 5 years we have seen, as a result of the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan, some 2 million more veterans coming into the VA, a net increase of about 1.5 million patients. That is a lot of people. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind or in the mind of the VA that if we are going to do justice to our veterans, we are going to need more doctors, more mental health counselors, more nurses, more medical personnel in general, so that when a veteran walks into a VA facility, that veteran will get quality care in a timely manner.

I have heard testimony in the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, which was very clear, and what virtually every major veterans organization has said is that when veterans get into the system, the quality of care they receive is good. It is good. That is not just what veterans are saying and what veterans organizations are saying; that is what a number of independent surveys and studies show us. The problem is access, and if we are going to on a long-term basis address that access problem, it is important to make sure we have the doctors, the nurses, and the medical personnel we should have. This bill provides $5 billion to make sure we get that personnel.

In addition to that, there are many facilities all over the country where there are very serious space problems. There are not the examination rooms doctors need in order to work efficiently, and this legislation addresses that with a $5 billion appropriation.

In addition, there has been legislation passed in the House overwhelmingly that says, quite correctly, we need to fund 27 major medical facilities all over this country in 18 States and in Puerto Rico, and this legislation does that as well.

In addition, what this legislation says--and this is mostly applicable to our rural States--is that if someone is a veteran living hundreds of miles away from a VA facility, when they are sick in the middle of winter or in the middle of summer, they are not going to have to travel hundreds of miles to get their physical therapy or to get the health care they need. If a veteran is living 40 miles away from a VA facility, they will be able to get their care in their community, again through a private doctor, through a community health center, through an Indian Health Service facility, through a Department of Defense facility.

This is a big step forward for many veterans in rural communities who will now be able to get care in the area they live rather than having to travel long distances to get health care.

This legislation also addresses some other very important issues that have not gotten a whole lot of attention but they are important, and I will mention what they are. All of us know that one of the outrages we have seen in recent years within the military is the very high level of sexual assault against women and against men as well. This legislation provides funding for the VA to increase their capability so women and men who are sexually assaulted will be able to come into the VA and get the care they need to address the problems associated with that assault, and I think that is a very important step forward.

This legislation also takes action we should have taken some years ago. The post-9/11 GI bill has been enormously successful in providing educational opportunities for the men and women who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and people who have served since 9/11. There was a gap in that legislation, and that gap was that a spouse of someone who died in Iraq or in Afghanistan was not eligible for all of the educational benefits of that post-9/11 GI bill. This legislation remedies that omission. It expands the John David Fry Scholarship Program to include surviving spouses of members of the Armed Forces who died in the line of duty. That means many young women out there will now have the opportunity to get a college education who otherwise would not have, and I think we owe that to all of those people who have already suffered so much.

This legislation also allows for veterans--all veterans eligible for the post-9/11 GI bill--to qualify for instate tuition under that legislation. This was part of a bill previously passed in the House, and we are going to pass it in the Senate.

There is another provision in here which is very important. A program which provides housing for veterans with traumatic brain injury was about to expire. This legislation extends that program for a number of years, which will be a real relief for people who were worried they would be out on the street and not have adequate housing.

It has been from day one--from my first day as chairman of the veterans committee--my belief that the cost of war in terms of what it does to the men and women who fight our battles is a lot greater than most Americans fully understand. We all mourn the 6,700-plus men and women who died in Iraq and in Afghanistan, but we should understand the cost of war is much greater than that tragedy. The cost of war is the men and women who came home without legs, came home without arms, without eyesight, loss of hearing; the cost of war is the 500,000 men and women who came home from Iraq and Afghanistan with the signature illnesses of this war, which are post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. Those are the signature injuries of this war, and we are talking about 500,000 men and women coming home with those very serious problems. In fact, today--just today--and every day close to 50,000 veterans are going to get outpatient mental health care in VA facilities all over this country--close to 50,000.

It has also been my view that when we fully understand the costs of war and the needs of the veterans and their families, it is absolutely imperative that we do not make veterans into political pawns. We do not say, yes, we are going to fund veterans' needs, but we are going to cut Head Start, we are going to cut the National Institutes of Health or we are going to cut education. That is absolutely unfair to our veterans. A cost of war is the cost of planes and guns and tanks and aircraft carriers--those are a cost of war. An equally significant cost of war is the needs of men and women who fought our battles and who used those weapons. What this legislation says and what the House just passed by a 420-to-5 vote is that taking care of veterans is in fact a cost of war.

The CBO has come up with some recent estimates which lower the costs a little bit. But this bill will put close to--a little bit less than $17 billion into VA health care over the next several years. There is $5 billion in offsets from within the VA that I was comfortable with that will bring the total cost of this package down to somewhere around perhaps $11 billion. Is that a lot of money? It is a lot of money. But that is the cost of war, and that is what happens when millions of veterans come home and need the care they are entitled to receive.

As I mentioned a moment ago, the House passed this legislation by an overwhelming vote of 420 to 5. I wish to thank Chairman Miller in the House for the work he has done in getting that result. My understanding is that in a few hours we will be voting on that bill, and I hope we can pass this legislation with a very strong bipartisan vote.

I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

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