Steve Lynch: “I thank the gentleman from Maryland for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I want to get away from the abstract here about studies…”

“I thank the gentleman from Maryland for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I want to get away from the abstract here about studies that talk about who's making what. I've got three VA facilities in my district: the Brockton VA Hospital, the Jamaica Plain Veterans Hospital and the West Roxbury Veterans Hospital. I spend a lot of time at the VA. Earlier this week, I had a chance to go through and talk to a lot of my VA folks: the nurses, the docs, the therapists, the nursing assistants, and the orderlies. Right now, we are trying to deal with the traumatic brain injury and PTSD issue at the VA, which is increasingly pernicious. We've got a lot of folks who are doing a lot of tours in Iraq and Afghanistan coming home, four, five, six tours of duty, and they've got problems. So we're relying on our folks at the VA to take care of our sons and daughters who are coming home, and they're hurting. Well, I just want to talk about one young woman who is a nursing assistant down in Brockton at the VA. She's a GS-3. That's who we're talking about. We're going to freeze her pay for the 3rd year in a row. And she is trying her hardest to take care of our veterans. She's a GS- 3 under the system. She makes $27,322 a year. That's what that young woman makes. She's a nursing assistant. She's working in a psychiatric ward trying to take care of our sons and daughters who are coming home who need help, and we're freezing her pay by this bill.…”