Political Quotes

“I rise to speak today on behalf of our veterans. I am here to speak about both challenge and opportunity. The challenge is the problems we face with our Veterans' Administration, which is that we are not getting the care for our veterans that they need and that we all want them to have and that they so very much deserve. We also have a real opportunity because we have been working on legislation. We have legislation on the Republican side in the Senate and on the Democratic side, and now we are working to bring those two pieces of legislation together. So I think this creates a real opportunity, and it is a vitally important opportunity--one that we grab and that we address on behalf of our veterans. We need to make sure we come together on bipartisan legislation that fixes the Veterans' Administration health care system, and it takes care of our veterans. I believe the solution, the real key to solving the problem, is choice--or another way to put it might be access to health care. I think that not only solves the problems we have seen with the wait lists but also the problem of distance, which is also an issue, and it is a challenge we see in States such as my own. For example, in our State the issue truly is distance. In other places it is access to health care. We know, for example, in places such as Phoenix, veterans were put on wait lists and in that way denied access to care. That is absolutely unacceptable--absolutely unacceptable.…”