Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our witnesses.
I want to follow up on that a little. I think we're confusing the purpose of these benefits. Every benefit doesn't necessarily apply to every veteran. Every benefit, especially these new ones, is designed for specific circumstances and to close gaps this committee, among others, identified. It's not that this applies to everything. We can be cynical if we want, but the simple fact is we have closed a number of gaps.
The critical injury benefit is not intended to compensate for the long term, because we have the disability award for that, but it is intended to compensate for the short term for those people it applies to. So it does fill a gap. It's the same thing with the caregiver benefit. It is not designed to be an income replacement, because the veteran is already getting full-time care by whatever mechanism. It is simply designed to compensate, not on an income replacement basis, and give some relief to the family caregiver.
I don't want to put you in too much of a spot, but is it fair to say that the purpose of all these benefits is very specific? It came from this committee. My opinion is we can always do more and we always will try to do more, but these benefits have been designed and are going to fit the purpose identified by the gaps identified by this committee.