Gwen Moore: “earlier this year, the VA made a priority request for $32.5 million for urgent and necessary upgrades for the spinal…”

“earlier this year, the VA made a priority request for $32.5 million for urgent and necessary upgrades for the spinal cord injury unit at the Zablocki VA Medical Center in Milwaukee. However, the subcommittee mark made a point of zeroing out this project. My amendment would restore the funding for this requested priority. Mr. Chairman, I can tell you that I am new to this body, so I was very curious as to why they would do this. Clearly the Zablocki spinal cord injury unit is not a ``bridge to nowhere.'' It is one of only 23 spinal cord injury units in the country, serving more than 500 veterans as in-patients and over 10,000 patients on an outpatient basis each year. Nationally, there are over 44,000 veterans suffering from spinal cord injuries that are now paraplegic and quadriplegic. At such a critical time when we are at war and the number of injured soldiers continues to increase, I had to ask myself, Mr. Chairman, what are they doing and why are we doing this? So what I did as a new Member is I went to something called the committee record, I believe, and what they said here is that they did this because this was of ``relatively low priority.'' Well, I was really confused then, Mr. Chairman, because I then checked with the budget documentation submitted by the Department of Veterans Affairs and discovered that they had listed this as their number one priority for fiscal year 2007.…”