Cord Byrd: “there is a crisis in the veterans health care system. The VA has belatedly admitted it is desperately short of cash and…”

“there is a crisis in the veterans health care system. The VA has belatedly admitted it is desperately short of cash and cannot make ends meet. What are the results? As a result, our veterans are in real danger of being shut off from the medical care they so urgently need and so rightly deserve. They are already suffering the indignity and the physical toll of understaffed medical facilities and dangerous delays in treatment. This is a shabby way to treat America's veterans. There are some who will say it is premature to add emergency funding for the VA to this bill and that we need to wait for more data to be collected and more numbers to be crunched. I say we have waited too long already. We have been hearing since the beginning of the year of the difficulties the current budget shortfall has caused the VA hospitals and clinics around the country. Due to budget shortfalls at the regional level, many of our local VA hospitals and clinics are being forced to institute hiring freezes and having to spend money set aside for equipment and maintenance on health care. Let me give Senators one example. According to information gathered by the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, the Togus Veterans Medical Center in Maine came up against a $14.2 million shortfall in mid-January for this fiscal year. To reduce the budget gap to $7 million, the center has diverted funds intended for equipment and left staff vacancies unfilled.…”