Annie Kuster

This is the final amendment to the bill, which will not kill the bill nor send it back to committee. If adopted, the bill will immediately proceed to final passage as amended. As a member of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, I have…

I think for us, and what you are hearing from us, and it may take bipartisan legislation that we would draft to put together to say we should have a presumption because I don't see why there is any reason to wait.

So I guess--and I want to share the Ranking Member's concern about the testimony about women veterans, birth defects.

Thank you very much, and congratulations. We are pleased to have you on board as our chair.

I think this is something that we have got consensus on. We want to move forward.

I hope that the President will appoint and the Senate will confirm the Secretary in due course and we will be able to move forward with our oversight role.

I continue to have whistleblowers come. And in the case that I have been talking about today, there was a long period of delay because the whistleblowers were concerned about their anonymity.

After it was in the Boston Globe that Secretary Shulkin showed up virtually the next day.

I would vastly prefer, which is something I emphasize in just about every time I speak, that if people have concerns they speak up and that we can do something about that.

Why wouldn't the Medical Director who was one of the whistleblowers have been able to convey these concerns up through the chain?

I think in order to understand where we are and how to restructure, we need to understand where we have been.

Senior leaders must be held accountable for failing to act and we must take a hard look at the organization from top to bottom to determine what is causing this lack of accountability.

These leaders should be held accountable for failing to take action.

We are tired of receiving reports, we are tired of inaction and, as I mentioned before, there were seven reports on the D.C. VA Medical Center.

we need to create an environment where concerns are addressed at the earliest possible date.

I want to thank the chair for rescheduling the hearing. My new hip is going great and I really appreciate it.

The role of supervision and the role of oversight is critically important, and we will continue to work together.

We didn't get from the VISN to the central office, again, until this all played out in the Boston Globe.

Since then, we have been aggressively pursuing this.

I want to work together in a bipartisan way as our Committee does, but we need leadership from the top.

I have a brief closing statement, and one point I would like to leave the record open long enough for the VA to respond to the questions that have been asked today.

We are very proud in New Hampshire of the development of the LUKE arm, and I have had a chance to see it in action, and it is really very impressive.

So love to work with you on that.

We must set our sights higher than a 19th century approach for mental health diagnosis.

While I appreciate the hard work and dedication of the witnesses and organizations that you represent, the testimony today does concern me.