Bob Filner: “We simply have let our veterans down in this budget. We have not honored the promise, we have not honored our…”

“We simply have let our veterans down in this budget. We have not honored the promise, we have not honored our commitment, we have not honored our contract with our Nation's veterans. Now, we are fond on the Committee on Veterans' Affairs, at least on the Democratic side, of saying that you do not have a surplus until you have paid your bills, and we have not paid our bills to the Nation's veterans. We had a decade of flat-line budgeting, and, as a result, the quality of medical care declined, the waiting times for appointments expanded greatly, and the new diseases and the diseases of aging veterans could not be handled with the same professionalism as previously. So we have not paid our bills to our Nation's veterans. Now, the distinguished chairman of the subcommittee said that we added $1 billion to last year's budget. Well, all independent analysts say that $1 billion for our veterans' health care system barely keeps up with inflation and does not allow us to make the gains that we had promised over the last decade.”