Tammy Baldwin

Now, certainly in terms of gaps that have been identified in the Veterans Choice program and other community care programs, we can't necessarily take all of those components that I view as critical...

Thank you. I just have a couple of closing questions, and I appreciate the opportunity to have another quick round on this, to really focus squarely on the gaps that exist.

Everyone put politics aside and actually focused on what was best for our veterans.

We're very pleased that you have a seat both at the authorizing table and the appropriating table on this, and I have appreciated your leadership.

Earlier today, Senator Capito and myself, the chairman, also Senator Tester, others of our colleagues on a bipartisan basis, introduced legislation to further some of the recommendations contained, Mr. Missal, in the Inspector General…

If I recall the sort of chain of command, the patient advocate was answering to or supervised or directed by the supervising physician who was actually treating Jason that was sort of the chain of command rather than an independent…

Thanks to the committee chair and ranking member for holding this hearing and particularly to all of the members relating to the action our committee has taken to fully fund the provisions of CARA that are the Jason Simcakoski Memorial and…

We need to stay vigilant and I am going to work my hardest to see that this legislation also gets across the finish line.

I wish more things around here could be like that.

I hope today to facilitate a candid conversation about improvements the Department is making and needs to make.

As Members of Congress, we have no greater responsibility than responding to the needs of our constituents.

You both have been champions uncovering issues within your local VA communities on this topic.

I support their effort.

This is totally inappropriate, and yet the report does not even mention Mr. Kelley, and he still works for Equifax.

Victims of this breach will really need to be able to control access to the reports from all three credit agencies to fully protect themselves.

Equifax is now offering free credit report locking for life, but only offering credit report monitoring through January 31, 2018.

Equifax set up a poorly functioning process where people would have to go to the Equifax website to find out if they were impacted.

I think it's clear that Equifax needs to do a lot more than it has to help victims respond to this breach.

So we all know that the Equifax breach compromised the personal and financial information of more than 145 million Americans.

Thank you for all the more bringing this to the forefront.

President Trump has frequently said that he supports Buy America policies, issuing a Buy America executive order and promising an infrastructure plan for Congress that will be guided by a buy American and hire American principle.

I will be focusing my questions on a topic that my colleagues on this Committee have heard me discuss multiple times before: domestic content preferences, commonly called Buy America.

I'm encouraged that we're continuing to focus on bipartisan work that can improve health care through the interoperability of electronic health records.

Input from a diverse set of health IT stakeholders, from vendors to patients during the development of this legislation, was truly invaluable in our process and to our bipartisan work.

Last year I worked with my colleague, Senator Hatch, to advance the development of a national structure for all health IT exchange networks to share at the basic level patient information with each other.