Repealing Section 403 of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013 - Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I rise in full support of the legislation on the floor.

I think most Members understand, as part of the 2013 bipartisan budget agreement, language was included which cut COLAs for military retirees. I think most Members here in the Senate and the House understand that was a mistake, an oversight, and is something that should be rectified and it should be rectified now. Promises made to people in the military should be kept, and our job is to do that.

This morning, as the chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, I wish to say a word on broader issues impacting the veterans community.

Shortly after this legislation is disposed of, we are going to move on to a comprehensive piece of legislation which addresses many of the very serious problems facing our veterans community. I will give a brief overview of what the legislation does. The legislation is the Comprehensive Veterans Health and Benefits and Military Retirement Pay Restoration Act of 2014--S. 1982.

The first point I will make is I honestly believe, in terms of the veterans issues, there is widespread bipartisan support. On the Veterans Committee, every Member of our committee--Democrat, Republican, or in my case Independent--believes very much that we owe our veterans more than we can provide them. Their sacrifices are too deep, the pains are great. But all Members of the committee in a bipartisan way are doing their best to protect the interests of our veterans, and I thank all of them for their hard work.

To as great a degree as possible, the bill which will be on the floor--the comprehensive veterans bill--is a bipartisan bill. It contains many provisions brought forth by my Republican colleagues. This bill consists of two omnibus bills unanimously passed by the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, supported by Democrats and Republicans. It also includes other provisions which had strong bipartisan support.

This legislation also contains two new provisions, both of which have bipartisan support. The first new addition addresses the restoration of cuts made to military retiree COLAs as a result of the 2013 bipartisan agreement, the exact same issue being debated on the floor right now. We also have that language in our bill. Promises made to veterans have got to be kept. We have to restore those cuts to COLAs for military retirees.

The second new provision not discussed, frankly, by the committee also has widespread bipartisan support, and authorizes the VA to enter into 27 major medical facility leases in 18 States and Puerto Rico.

Interestingly, the legislation which will soon be on the floor contains two major provisions already passed by House Republicans. So to as great a degree as possible, in terms of language in the bill, in terms of working with our Republican colleagues in the House, this is a bipartisan bill and should have the support of every Member of the Senate who believes in protecting the interests of veterans. And I hope that is the vast majority of the people here.

As Senator Begich mentioned a moment ago, our veterans have paid a very heavy price. What I have learned in the little bit more than the year in which I have been chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee is I think most Americans, including myself, were not fully aware of what that sacrifice was. And what that sacrifice was in recent years was not just the loss of over 6,700 Americans who lost their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq but the impact of those wars on hundreds and hundreds of thousands of veterans who came home either wounded in body--loss of arms, loss of legs, loss of hearing, or loss of sight--or the more invisible wounds of war.

What most Americans don't know is a rather shocking number, but we are now dealing with hundreds of thousands of men and women who came home from Iraq and Afghanistan who are doing their best to cope with post-traumatic stress disorder, which has a terrible impact on their lives, on their families' lives, and on their ability to get a job and keep a job; and traumatic brain injury, the result of being in the presence of IEDs and the explosions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We are also dealing in this rough economy, this struggling economy, this high unemployment economy, with many young veterans coming home unable to find jobs. Some in the National Guard left decent jobs and came home to find those jobs are not there.

I think virtually every Member in the Senate understands that at a time when the VA went from paper to digital and made the transformation which was necessary to deal with the claims process, the claims process today remains too long. The backlog is too great. We have to deal with that issue.

We are dealing with a situation where young men and women were wounded in war who had hopes and dreams of starting their own families, but as a result of injuries sustained in those wars, for whatever reason, lost their reproductive capabilities and they still want to have families.

We are dealing with issues of sexual assault--a scandal, an outrage I know every Member of the Senate feels strongly about. Women and men who were sexually assaulted are coming home in need of treatment and are unable to get that treatment.

We are dealing with a situation today above and beyond the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where there are people--often women, wives and sisters--who are under great stress taking care of disabled veterans who have no arms and no legs. They have devoted their lives to those people and they are hurting as well.

As chairman of the veterans' committee, what I have done is listened as carefully as I could to what the veterans community--representing some 22 million veterans--had to say about the problems veterans are facing.

My very fine staff and I--along with my Republican colleagues and their very fine staffs--worked together. We said: These are the problems facing our veterans. We all know that on Veterans Day and Memorial Day every Member of the Senate goes out and gives a great speech about how much they love and respect veterans and how much they appreciate the sacrifices made by veterans.

Now is the time to stand and go beyond words and rhetoric. Now is the time to, in fact, address the real and serious problems facing those men and women whose families experienced the ultimate sacrifice and those men and women who came home wounded in body and spirit.

We cannot solve all of the problems facing veterans. We cannot bring back loved ones lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and the other wars. We cannot bring them back to their wives, their mothers, their dads, and their kids. We cannot do that. We cannot magically replace the arms and the legs or eyesight lost in war, but we do have the moral obligation to do everything humanly possible to protect and defend those men and women who protected and defended us. We can do that and that we must.

I am very proud the legislation that will soon be on the floor has the strong support of virtually every veteran and military organization in this country, and that includes all of the major organizations representing millions and millions of veterans.

I thank the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the VFW, the Disabled American Veterans, also known as DAV, Vietnam Veterans of America, the Military Officers Association of America, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the Paralyzed Veterans of America, the Gold Star Wives, and dozens and dozens of other veterans and military organizations that are supporting this legislation.

The Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs has received letters of support from virtually all of these organizations, and if Members want to check out why these organizations that are representing millions of veterans are supporting this bill, they will find those letters on our Web site.

I will quote from one of the letters. This letter is from the Disabled American Veterans, DAV.

This ..... bill, unprecedented in our modern experience, would create, expand, advance, and extend a number of VA benefits, services and programs that are important to DAV and to our members.

They see it--as do many of the other veterans organizations--as one of the most comprehensive pieces of veterans legislation brought forth in the modern history of Congress. I am proud of it. I thank the veterans organizations not just for their support of this legislation but for the help they gave us in drafting this legislation.

This legislation did not come from Bernie Sanders or from anybody else on the committee. It came from the veterans community itself. It came from representatives of veterans organizations who came before us in hearings, who came before us in private meetings, and said: Senator, here are the problems facing our veterans. If you are serious about going beyond rhetoric and speeches and truly want to help veterans and their families, this is what needs to be done.

We listened. We could not do everything, but we did put many of the major concerns facing the veterans community in this bill. Again, I thank the veterans organizations for being our partner in drafting this legislation.

I also wish to take this opportunity to thank those people who have currently cosponsored this legislation, and that includes Senator Landrieu, Senator Begich, the Presiding Officer Senator Schatz, Senator Brown, Senator Blumenthal, Senator Hirono, Senator Boxer, Senator Casey, Senator Gillibrand, Senator Heinrich, Senator Heitkamp, Senator Merkley, Senator Murray, Senator Reed, Senator Shaheen, Senator Whitehouse, Senator Rockefeller, Senator Tester, and Senator Cantwell. I thank all of them for their strong support.

I will take a few minutes to touch on some of the areas this comprehensive bill covers. As I return to the floor in the coming days, I will go into greater length about each of these provisions. Each of these provisions, unto themselves, is enormously important in terms of the needs of our veterans.

As I mentioned earlier, our comprehensive veterans bill--consistent with the Pryor bill--will restore the cuts made in the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013 to military retirees. We address that issue in our bill.

This comprehensive veterans legislation deals with another issue--not necessarily a sexy issue--that in fact impacts a large number of veterans in communities all over America, and that is that it will allow the VA to enter into 27 major medical facility leases in 18 States and Puerto Rico. That means--for a variety of reasons too complicated to get into right now--we have CBOC, community-based outpatient clinics, and other veterans facilities that are ready to go. They are on the drawing board.

Actually, it is beyond the drawing board, but we have not been able to pull the plug on it. This is very important to veterans all over this country. It is important to Republicans, it is important to Democrats, and it is time to get this done. By the way, this has been passed in the House of Representatives. We need to do it and that is part of this legislation.

This legislation includes groundbreaking provisions that would expand access to VA health care. In my view and in the view of veterans all over this country, the VA provides high-quality, cost-effective care to millions and millions of our veterans. There are approximately 6.2 million veterans accessing VA health care today. About 8 million are signed up for VA care.

This legislation expands access to VA health care, allows more veterans to come in, and ends a very

complicated priority 8 eligibility. Priority 8 is a situation where there are hundreds and hundreds of different eligibility levels all over the country, and it makes it very confusing for priority 8 veterans to determine whether they are eligible. We ended that and simplified it. The result is that more veterans will be able to access VA health care. We have also expanded complementary and alternative medicine within the VA. The truth is the VA is now doing a good job in providing complementary and alternative medicine, and that means meditation, acupuncture, yoga, and other treatments to veterans who are concerned about not being dependent on medication. One of the great problems we have nationally and in the VA is overmedication of people who have problems associated with pain and other ailments. The VA has done a good job. We are going to expand that opportunity.

My experience--having gone around the country--is that both within the Department of Defense hospitals and the VA, more and more veterans are looking at these alternative-type treatments and want to break their dependence on overmedication.

What we also do in this legislation is something that is terribly important. It is my strong belief that dental care must be considered a part of health care. The fact is that in this country there are millions of people--above and beyond the veterans community--who cannot find affordable dental care. Right now within the VA, dental care--with the exception of service-connected problems and homeless veterans--is not open to veterans, and we begin the process to do a significant pilot program to bring dental care into the VA. That is extremely important for the veterans community.

I think all of us remember not so many months ago the Government of the United States was shut down and caused all kinds of problems for all kinds of people. What is not widely known is that disabled veterans and veterans receiving their pension were 7 to 10 days away from not getting their checks. We have disabled veterans all over this country who live from month to month through those checks, and they were 7 to 10 days away from not getting those checks. This legislation provides for advanced appropriations for mandatory VA benefits. By passing that provision, we will never again put disabled vets or veterans who are dependent on their pensions in the position of not getting their checks when they need it.

One of the issues that has been discussed a great deal is the issue of benefits backlog. There is no disagreement in this Senate--whether one is a Republican, Democrat, Independent--that it is not acceptable for veterans who applied for benefits to have to wait for years to get those benefits. In my view, what the VA is now doing is undergoing a massive transformation of their benefit system, going from paper--which was incomprehensible to me. In 2008 their system was paper. They are going from paper to digital. They are making progress, but I want to see them make more progress. This legislation includes some important provisions to make sure we end this unacceptable backlog of VA benefits.

One of the issues that has also received some attention is the issue of instate tuition assistance for post-9/11 veterans. A number of years ago we passed very significant legislation which enabled some 900,000 post-9/11 veterans and family members to get higher education throughout this country. This legislation would give our transitioning servicemembers a fair shot at attaining their educational goals without incurring an additional financial burden.

We deal with the issue of somebody from out of State moving into another State and making sure that veteran is paying no more than what the instate tuition is for that State. This is a very important provision and, by the way, a provision that was passed in the House of Representatives. The language is pretty much the same in this bill.

We promised veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan that they would have 5 years of free VA health care when they came home. For a variety of reasons, people have not taken advantage of that. We think it is important to extend--from 5 to 10 years--unfettered access to VA health care for recently separated veterans, and that is what this legislation does.

I don't have to mention to anybody that our economy--while slowly improving--still has many challenges. Unemployment is much too high. What this legislation would do is reauthorize provisions from the VOW to Hire Heroes Act of 2011, including a 2-year extension for the Veterans Retraining Assistance Program, otherwise known as the VRAP program. In other words, what we are saying to our veterans is when they come home, we want a job to be there for them. We want them to get integrated back into civilian life, so we have some very important provisions in here for employment opportunities for our veterans.

As I mentioned earlier, sexual assault is a scandal. The numbers are appallingly high. What this legislation does is enable those women and men who were sexually assaulted to come into the VA to get the quality of care their situations require and deserve.

This provision was inspired by Ruth Moore, who struggled for 23 years to receive VA disability compensation. So we have language making sure those who suffered sexual assault will get the care within the VA they absolutely are entitled to.

I mentioned earlier, also, that several thousand men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan were wounded in ways that make it impossible for them to have babies. These are people who really want families, and some of them are now spending a very significant amount of money in the private sector through a number of approaches in order to be able to have babies. We have language, a provision in this bill, which would help female and male veterans who have suffered significant spinal cord, reproductive, and urinary tract injuries to start a family. I think that is absolutely the right thing to do.

Several years ago this Congress did the right thing by establishing a Caregivers Act, which said to those people who were caring for disabled vets that we understand how difficult--how difficult--that work is, that you are taking care of people who need constant attention, loved ones who need constant attention, and we are going to help you do what you have been doing.

The good news is we passed that legislation. The bad news is it only applied to post-9/11 veterans. I think there was a general understanding, an assumption, that we were going to expand that program to all veterans--Vietnam, World War II, Korea--so those people, mostly women who are staying home, taking care of veterans, get the support they need. So the extension of the Caregivers Act is also included in this legislation.

Those are some of the provisions. This is a 400-page bill, and I just touched on some of them. But let me end in the way I began. There is no way we can ever fully repay the debt we owe to the men and women who put their lives on the line defending this country. That is just the simple nature of things. We are not going to bring back the husbands who were lost in war, the wives who came back without any legs. We are not going to bring fathers and mothers back to children who lost their dad or their mom. We are not going to restore eyesight to people who are blind. We cannot do that.

But if this country means anything, it means that we have to keep the promises we made to veterans and their families; that while we cannot do everything, we have to do as much as we can to make the lives of our veterans and their families, their loved ones, as happy and productive as we possibly can.

So this legislation is from Senators who listened to our veterans, heard

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