Maurice Hinchey: “I would draw the gentleman's attention to the fact that the Inspector General's report from the Veterans Administration…”

“I would draw the gentleman's attention to the fact that the Inspector General's report from the Veterans Administration, although it did not specifically in that report say that VERA was responsible for the decline in the quality of care, for the decline in the quality of maintenance at those Veterans Administration hospitals, for the decline in personnel, for the misallocation of personnel, for the incompetent personnel who were there at those facilities and for the increase in mortality at those facilities, it is quite clear that all those things occurred immediately upon the implementation of VERA and continued to get worse as VERA was continually implemented. So while I did not expect the Veterans Administration to say specifically that VERA was responsible, it does not take an awful lot of reasoning to conclude from that report that these adverse circumstances occurred shortly after VERA was put into place, and as VERA was implemented they continued to get worse.”