David Roe

That is unacceptable to me and I am sure everyone in this room.

It was Barry's story and accompanying allegations, that 40 veteran patients had died while waiting to receive care.

We must not lose sight of where we started.

The process of converting between various electronic formats may introduce unintentional errors or omissions.

I want to keep our work this evening laser focused on the future.

There was a 62 percent increase in premiums this year.

What happened is exactly what happened in our State of Tennessee 20 years ago when we expanded Medicaid called 'TennCare.'

The Affordable Care Act said it wanted to lower costs and increase access. Who could disagree with that?

I just can't imagine a more important paradigm or model, you know, in any trade, in any vocation.

I would contend that every American is entitled to two things: number one, an opportunity, and number two, the right to define success for themselves so long as long as it doesn't impact the liberty of others.

In the State of Tennessee we recognized this problem a few years ago, and hats off to our State legislature and the Governor who provides -- ours is the only State in the union, I think, that provides free community college and technical…

It's criminal that more people don't know about them.

Now I agree with that, it would do that. I'm not saying that you should do that. We have a situation now where there's 30-something thousand people, these are all deaths that are preventable.

But is that a system we want to continue at the VA? Because the VA is a huge system, and treating millions of people, and not thousands, but millions.

It looks to me like that's a sloppy system, if that's the case.

Obviously, we know that there's a drug epidemic, and certainly in the State of Tennessee I live in, it is.

I don't buy that argument, and I don't buy that we don't have enough people working.

It's to take care of the veteran.

I'm looking for how hard and how well we fulfill that mission.

To care for him who shall have borne the battle.

What was the point of that? That was a solution looking for a problem.

I think that one of the reasons that President Trump got elected was he spoke to people in the country who wanted to get this economy going.

Overhauling the health care system for Americans who answered the call of duty by serving in the military is a national priority.

So the fact that VA does not have the technology to pay its bills is actually hurting our mission of health care.

We cannot talk VA health care... in a vacuum outside of the general public.