Political Quotes

“I rise today in strong support of the VA conference committee report, which I expect and hope will be on the floor here in a couple of hours. That conference committee report was passed yesterday by the House with an overwhelming vote of 420 to 5, and I hope very much our vote here in the Senate will be as strong as the vote in the House. The conference committee legislation that we will be voting on, frankly, is certainly not the legislation I would have written. I think it is fair to say it is not the legislation that the chairman of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, Jeff Miller, would have written; it is, in fact, a compromise, but it is a compromise I can strongly support, and I hope all of my Senate colleagues will support it as well. This bill does a number of very important things to address the problems facing the veterans of our country. Right now veterans in many parts of this country are on very long waiting lists before they get VA health care. I think in the last month or so the VA has made a concerted effort to reach out to those veterans and to get them care when necessary in the private sector, and I think Acting Secretary Sloan Gibson did a good job in jump-starting that process and saying to veterans we are going to do everything we can to get them quality care in a timely manner. Obviously, this is an expensive proposition, but it is one we have to address.…”