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Mr. COATS. Madam President, last week our Nation commemorated the 70th anniversary of D-day. Leo Scheer of Huntington County, IN, is one of those courageous veterans who survived the outlying assault on the beaches of Normandy, and last month he made the trip to Washington, DC, through the Honor Flight Network to receive a hero's welcome from a grateful Nation.
My office had the honor of greeting Leo and this group of heroes upon their arrival to the World War II Memorial, and Leo made an unforgettable impression with his humility, demeanor, and strength of character. Leo is a member of what we have come to know as the ``greatest generation.'' They easily deserve that title, where duty comes as second nature, where braggadocio is not present, where simply standing up and serving your country in a time of crisis is responded to overwhelmingly without complaint and with true honor and dignity.
Sadly, there are a dwindling number of those not only who arrived on the shores of D-day in Normandy but those who served throughout the world's largest military conflict in history. While those great service men and women are still here to share their stories--at least a few--we must remember the sacred promise that we as a Nation made to them to give them the care they deserve when they come back home.
As a veteran myself, my hope is that our Nation will carry out this promise not only to our World War II vets but to all who have served in conflicts from that point forward--from Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places. We must live up to the promise for all who were called to serve and answered that call.
Regrettably, in recent months we have seen this promise broken and shattered. Just this week an internal audit by the Department of Veterans Affairs revealed that the department's problems have affected 76 percent of VA facilities. Nearly 100,000 veterans continue to wait for medical appointments. These are staggering figures.
In my home State of Indiana confirmed audit findings show that veterans endured unacceptably long wait times. Some Hoosier veterans never even received an appointment. This is unacceptable. That is why today I stand here to support the bipartisan Sanders-McCain veterans bill that would implement key changes to the existing VA health care system.
This is not a perfect bill, and there are parts of it that I wish were different. I hope that we can manage some needed changes as it moves over to the House of Representatives and then to conference. I hope the final bill will make our veterans proud and begin the process of reform that the VA so desperately needs.
Let me address three key reforms in this legislation that I think are essential to moving forward and the primary reason why I have agreed to support this. First, giving veterans more choices in care--perhaps the most important provision in this legislation--is allowing veterans who cannot be scheduled within a reasonable time the option to receive care from non-VA facilities or private sector facilities outside of the VA. This also applies to veterans that reside more than 40 miles away from a VA facility, many of them not in a condition to be able to secure the transportation they need for that care, so they don't have to endure long drives to get care. We must ensure that veterans receive timely care, and if the VA cannot provide it, then our veterans should be free to go elsewhere for care, including Medicare providers.
Second, the removal of bad actors--there are a lot of good people working at VA. Their hearts are in the right place. They are talented and provide good care and good service. I don't mean to demean their contributions to veterans' health care, but we do know that there have been mistakes, mismanagement, and there has been some outright fraud, it appears. We will have to prosecute that. This reform would authorize the Secretary of the VA to demote or fire senior executive service employees based on their performance. That is not present now, and if we are going to change the management it takes more than just asking the first top person to resign as has happened. We need to look at the management team and those that oversee those that are providing the care and what their responsibility is in that role. Passage here would shake up the leadership of the VA so those people can be held accountable for their actions.
The third provision I want to mention is providing more VA locations. It is clear that some of our veterans have to travel very long distances. Also it is clear that the facilities currently in place are short of help and there are not enough to address the needs of the many veterans that are entering the system. So this bill would establish 26 new VA medical facilities around the country. As I said, while this legislation is not perfect, it is an important start but it should not and will not be the end of our work to live up to our promises to veterans.
Ultimately, as I stated before to our body of Senators, the VA needs a change of culture. Too many bureaucrats view our veterans as a list of numbers rather than the heroes worthy of our very best care. We have to look at our veterans through a different lens, one that sees them clearly as defenders of our freedom and as the heroes they are.
We must continue to investigate and reform the culture within the VA and ensure that this crisis doesn't happen again. That is why I called for an independent investigation. This bill authorizes the process of beginning these independent evaluations. Also the committee has provided additional funding to specifically allow the inspector general to conduct an independent investigation into the VA, and I join my many colleagues to ask the Department of Justice to join in this investigation. Now, unfortunately, this culture of indifference at the VA is not new. For years veterans have faced excessively long waits for disability claims. When I returned to the Senate in 2011, these waits were over 600 days in Indianapolis. Veterans were waiting over 2 years to have their claims adjudicated. Once we shined a light on the problem, the situation improved somewhat, but our veterans still face waits that are far too long both for medical visits and to receive their disability benefits.
My staff in Indianapolis currently have over 550 active cases that we are working on for Hoosier veterans who are seeking help and have not gotten satisfactory responses from the VA. So they call us and say: Can you help? We do everything that we can to help expedite the process. In many cases these veterans are just trying to assess the benefits that they have rightfully earned and they just want an answer.
Reflecting on Leo Scheer's service to our Nation on D-day reminded me of the opportunity that I had to visit the beaches of Normandy while I was Ambassador to Germany. It was, to say the least, a powerful and extremely emotional experience standing on the bluffs overlooking the spread of beaches from Utah to Omaha, and it made me reflect on the countless lives lost in service to our Nation.
I was standing there on a perfectly calm day. The water was gently lapping on the shore. The beaches were empty. A soft warm breeze was blowing. The sun was shining--just a beautiful day--and I was overwhelmed by the violence that must have taken place that I could only have imagined. We have all seen the movie ``Saving Private Ryan,'' and I give Mr. Spielberg great credit for making that a very realistic picture of what happens. But I don't think Hollywood, or those of us who weren't there, could imagine the violence that was taking place on that beach when our troops went ashore. The silence was not there. There must have been a cacophony of noise with hundreds of ships offshore unloading our soldiers into landing vehicles. Many of them were shot down by the German bunkers up in the bluffs, built-in concrete fortifications--an almost impossible task. Many of them never even got out of their landing craft. When the doors opened, many were shot before they reached the water. The water was red with the blood from our soldiers who never made it to the beach. The beach was littered with bodies of those who never made it to the edge of the cliff. And the sacrifice that was made in climbing those cliffs and getting to those German bunkers took many, many hundreds if not thousands of more lives.
So visiting the graves of soldiers afterwards, pausing to say a prayer of gratitude for their sacrifice leads us to this point where we have to understand what it is we are trying to provide and why we need to provide it. That is in a response to those who put their lives on the line and sacrificed those lives--and many ended up with lifelong disabilities--a commitment to those that we would take care of them when they came back.
They have come back and run into a government-run bureaucracy that has run amuck. If it proves anything, it proves that government just simply doesn't do big stuff very well, without confusion, without bureaucracy, without duplication, without excessive costs. It is not efficient and not effective, nowhere near what the private sector can offer. That is why there is the provision for veterans who cannot get care at the VA on a timely basis to have the opportunity to use our private system.
They deserve our utmost care. They served on the frontline, but when they go for benefit decisions and when they go for health care, they are not in the front of the line, they are at the back of the line, and that is not right.
We cannot let the sun set today, and I am glad we are not, because we are voting to move this legislation forward. In doing so we are going to make a statement that we are going to try to live up to that promise and do the best that we possibly can. As I said, as a veteran I expect my country to fulfill the promises to my fellow service men and women, and as a Senator I will seek to hold the Veterans' Administration accountable and to do everything I can to help in the reform of the system. That reform is so desperately needed.
The leader of the D-day effort, GEN Dwight D. Eisenhower called the invasion of Normandy ``a fight in which we would accept nothing less than full victory.'' It is in that spirit that I call upon my Senate colleagues to immediately take up and pass this legislation on behalf of our veterans and then to continue the work of changing the culture of the VA so that we don't have to come back years from now and repeat this process all over again.
Let's get it right this time. The fight to restore trust to our veterans is one we are waging, and to paraphrase General Eisenhower, we should accept nothing less than victory.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
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