Karen Thurman: “Mr. Chairman, as my colleagues on the floor can see, this is a very important issue in Florida. I think the entire…”

“Mr. Chairman, as my colleagues on the floor can see, this is a very important issue in Florida. I think the entire Florida delegation is down here to speak on this issue. I might say that I think the reason we feel so passionately about it is because many of us were on the other end of this issue not but 5 years ago, 4 years ago, where our veterans were coming into our offices telling us that they could not get into the VA hospital; they could not get the health care that had been promised to them. So by the very nature, this has risen to be such a huge issue. Now, on top of that, since the VERA has been implemented, I have to say people come in and say for the first time they are actually not having to wait for as long as they have. Secondly, I would also like to point out that we have done what I think has been a masterful job in Florida in using even the amount of small resources that we have gotten, in the fact that we are not building huge VA hospitals anymore. What we are doing is we are doing outpatient clinics. We are actually going into these communities. We are actually having these veterans be served right in their own back yards, not 100 miles away, not 200 miles away, which in some cases is the way they did it. It was very cumbersome and very difficult.”