Thank you.
These committee meetings, stakeholder summits, and subcommittee meetings have been taking place for many years. Witnesses are saying the same things over and over. So far, there has been very little movement on veterans' issues. We can all talk until the cows come home, but at the end of the day, we still have suicides, divorces, and damaged families fighting for help. All this is showing the next generation that they don't want to fight for this country, because there is no one who has their back when they become injured.
There are more private organizations stepping up and creating programs and services that are proving to be more effective than the Veterans Affairs department. Now you can see how severely broken VAC is from both the veteran and family side and the provider side. Do we really want to keep throwing good money and ideas after bad? These problems go all the way back to the creation of Veterans Affairs. We know veterans have a distrust of Veterans Affairs. We know that once a trust is broken with a veteran, it is gone. It is no longer in existence.
This committee needs to recommend a fresh start. Start over. Start from scratch.
For clarification, to cap on the point about where children fall when they ask for help, they actually fall under the member's K number, their client number. My daughter's psychological and psychiatric sessions are under my husband's K number.
