Bill Pascrell: “Over 8 years since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are still not properly addressing traumatic brain…”

“Over 8 years since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are still not properly addressing traumatic brain injury, also known as the signature injury of both wars. {time} 1300 I want to thank Chairman McKeon, Ranking Member Smith, all the chairmen of the subcommittees, as well as members of this committee who are moving forward on this issue. I wish we had the same compromise as we would have on other issues. I commend them for compromising. That's what our Forefathers talked about. I'm glad to see that the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Brain Injury will move oversight to the Army where there will be an increased efficiency and attention for our soldiers. But there are still problems with screening and treating our troops. Recently, NPR ran an expose on how the Department of Defense has tested over 500,000 soldiers with a predeployment cognitive test, but has performed fewer than 3,000 tests postdeployment to actually compare the results and see if our troops were injured in theater. The fiscal 2008 National Defense Authorization bill, bipartisanly supported, Public Law 110-181, required predeployment and postdeployment screenings of a soldier's cognitive ability. Current policy is clearly violating the intent of the law. We must ensure that the same tool is used for pre- and postdeployment cognitive screenings. We can't gauge the cognitive health of our troops without comparing tests.…”