Congressman Filner on Health Care for Veterans

Closing remarks of Congressman Bob Filner (D-CA), Chairman of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, on the momentous passage of the GI Bill.  While the rest of Congressman Filner's remarks addressed education, he also commented on veterans ongoing health care needs and concerns, here:

"Last year, Congress made the largest increase in veterans’ health care funding in American history, when we increased VA funding by 30 percent, successfully adding $12 billion more than the President’s request and $39 billion more over five years. The new GI Bill is an even larger fiscal commitment to our nation’s veterans - providing a quality educational benefit for those to whom we owe so much.

While we have made much progress, new challenges continue to mount. Tens of thousands of service members are being discharged from the military without adequate diagnosis or treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury. Refusing to face this challenge, leaders at the VA have attempted to manipulate suicide data to portray a lesser problem. In addition, the claims backlog for VA benefits now totals well over 600,000. The VA also failed to protect our veterans when they became more involved with research than providing treatment - When Chantix, an anti-smoking drug, was linked to suicidal thoughts and aggressive and erratic behavior, the VA failed to immediately eliminate their testing of veterans, placing them under increased risk.

It is obvious that our work has just begun, and I will continue to fight to hold the VA accountable for their actions and provide the very best care to our nation’s veterans. I will work to transition the VA from Veterans Adversary to Veterans Advocate!"

-- Congressman Bob Filner, Representative for California’s 51st Congressional District, and Chairman of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, linked here.

Editor's note: Regarding Chantix, we did a post the other day, linked here, which talks about how to learn more about the medications being prescribed for PTSD, and how to learn about possible interactions with other drugs, such as Chantix.