Veterans Health Care

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SANDERS. I thank my colleagues and friends from Nevada and Pennsylvania.

Senator Heller, a member of the Veterans' Affairs Committee, has been a very active member and a very constructive member. Senator Casey from Pennsylvania has done an extraordinary job in representing the veterans from his State and on overall veterans policy. I thank them both for working in a bipartisan way in addressing one of the significant challenges confronting the VA; that is, the claims backlog.

I thank them for their support in working to advance not only solutions to the claims problems, but comprehensive legislation that would improve the lives of our Nation's veterans and their families. Both of these Senators supported the two major pieces of legislation for veterans that have come to the floor.

Yesterday, the Senate took a step forward in addressing a very significant crisis, and that is making sure that we provide health care to all of our veterans in a high quality and timely way.

However, as I indicated on the floor yesterday, what we did yesterday is only the beginning. We have a lot more work to do if we are going to represent the interests of the men and women who have put their lives on the line to defend us.

I welcome my colleagues' continued support and look forward to working together with them to pass legislation that would address the challenges of the backlog, as well as the many, many other concerns that have been presented to the committee by the veterans service organizations.

We take their concerns seriously. I applaud them both very much for coming up with some concrete ideas as to how we address the backlog problem, and I pledge to them that we are going to work as aggressively as we can to address the issue.

I thank them both very much for helping us on this issue.

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