Secretary, you said earlier that we will move out of the rescue phase on homelessness.

the VA backlog reduction plan shows that in order to eliminate the backlog by 2015 VA will need to decide 1.2 million claims this year, 1.6 million claims next year, and 1.9 million claims in 2015.

I appreciate that, Mr. Secretary, and I encourage it.

the lack of consistent predictions and a lack of transparency lead me to question if VA's stewardship of the taxpayers' money is leading to better outcomes.

I think we need to better understand it, if, in fact, we provide fair but effective oversight to an IT program of this size.

Currently, nearly 70 percent of the claims are backlogged, meaning that they have been waiting for a decision for more than 125 days.

I am not that confident about the Affordable Care Act and its implementation being seamless and its costs being predictable.

The most alarming thing to me today is, I cannot find anybody in the administration who has a Plan B.

I think one of the problems that we have with the Affordable Care Act is that nobody really understands what the costs, not just of implementation, but of running the Affordable Care Act, will be.

Part D was designed to generate fierce competition between suppliers.

The truth is that the cost of the Affordable Care Act is very questionable.

One thing that I have learned in health care is, for everything that you require, health care is going to have a reaction to that, and usually it is an increasing cost.