Congress fights hard to protect veterans

By PATRICK KENNEDY
The Providence Journal
Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Especially on this most recent Memorial Day, during wartime, everybody sings the praises of our veterans, and rightly so. But talk is cheap. The real measure of our gratitude and respect for those who carry our flag will be years from now when we have -- or have not -- delivered on our commitment to them.

Our first obligation is to do everything in our power to return to good health the men and women who have fought for America. Congress has recently taken several key steps in providing for wounded soldiers and veterans. We recently blocked administration-proposed increases in premiums for the military health-insurance program, provided for a 3.5 percent pay increase for service members, expanded "concurrent receipt" eligibility to ensure that veterans' pension benefits are not offset by their disability benefits, reformed the disability-evaluation system and improved the delivery of health-care services in the wake of the Walter Reed Hospital scandal of bad care.

Additionally, Congress recently passed a budget that would provide $43.1 billion for discretionary veterans' programs, including medical care. Following the recommendations of the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Disabled American Veterans, Congress provided the largest increase ever in veterans' medical care. This funding will not only meet today's critical needs, such as reducing waiting lines for medical care and clearing the backlog in claims processing, but also is an investment, bolstering research into treating traumatic brain injury and mitigating the devastation of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Congress must also vigorously pursue its oversight duties.

Recent press revelations that $3.8 billion in bonuses were provided to Department of Veterans Affairs officials, even as the department strains to provide for current and new veterans, make it clear that Congress must keep a firm hand on the helm when it comes to the leadership at the department. These most recent revelations follow the veterans' data security breaches of 2006, the underestimate of returning veterans in 2005-2006 and recent McClatchy newspaper studies examining geographical disparities in veterans mental-health care and contradictions in V.A. claims on access, satisfaction and quality of care. While the Department of Veterans Affairs is undoubtedly committed to providing the best level of care to our veterans, wartime has made the mission more challenging.

Even as Congress focuses on bolstering the resources at both the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs to provide for our nation's youngest veterans, we cannot forget the generation of veterans before them. Providing for a new generation of veterans with new types of injuries, while continuing to provide quality health care to a population of older veterans, is admittedly daunting. But it is not impossible, and the first step is to guard against the erosion of care.

This Congress has consistently fought against "zero-sum" efforts to take from one veteran population to give to another, and the unity of the veterans' coalition across generations is striking.

The steps that Congress has recently taken are only the beginning. The challenge of providing for veterans is not simply whether we stand with them today, when they are in the news under fire and their suffering, and their families' suffering, is there for all of America to see.

The true challenge is whether we will still stand with them when the guns fall silent, when the fighting stops, when they come home, and most of America has moved on.

(Patrick Kennedy, a Democrat, represents Rhode Island's 1st Congressional District.)