Veterans Affairs committee  Good afternoon. Thank you for affording me the opportunity to discuss some of the things we're doing within the Department of Veterans Affairs. It's been a couple of years since I testified before all of you. I've been up there a couple of times, but usually when I come up, it'

Veterans Affairs committee  Question away.

Veterans Affairs committee  For us, it's commercial, off-the-shelf software. I don't know much on that, but I know that it's new for DOD. It's also new for us. One of the requirements will have to be that we need all the data transferred over. We need to have that historical medical information if they're

Veterans Affairs committee  Hopefully before I retire.

Veterans Affairs committee  Sure. I'm a user of VA health care and DOD health care. I have a choice now to go between VHA or what we call Tricare at the Department of Defense. What we don't have as much is that if I have a specialty or a private physician who I want to use, especially if I'm in a rural pa

Veterans Affairs committee  Absolutely. You've probably heard of some of our organizations. It was my privilege and fortune to have been a past national commander for one of our largest ones, Disabled American Veterans, so I know the veterans service organizations quite well. I try to work and leverage that

Veterans Affairs committee  I can't give much on the medical side. I can only talk about the presumption side that we've gotten from Agent Orange and the Camp Lejeune water contamination. I really can't talk specifically to that one.

Veterans Affairs committee  You're referring to our vet centres, I believe.

Veterans Affairs committee  Our vet centres were stood up after Vietnam. When our Vietnam veterans came home, they weren't really treated correctly, and didn't trust the government. Their own stood up the vet centres. They have the state criteria of eligibility, which is combat veterans, as you say. They do

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, I would say that's accurate. It's a struggle. You know, one is too many, and I think we're at 20 a day now. We were at 22. Our secretary is getting us to what's called “getting to zero”. How do we get to zero? I think it goes to how we get our community involved to help us g

Veterans Affairs committee  You might have seen in the news, because there have been some heated questions on this, that we have a caregiver benefit. It's actually derived out of our health care side, but that is only for veterans who are from the Post-9/11 GI Bill generation. One of my good friends right n

Veterans Affairs committee  The last part is that if you're 100% permanent and total, we give an extra—an SMC, special monthly compensation. If you're severely disabled, you get extra for housebound care, for aid and attendants and that type of benefit. But you have to be rated as such.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes. That's actually part of the transition assistance program, or TAP, where we also do the same with the service members. We try to educate them on how to interact with the civilian sector, too. It's across the board. We're working with employers to help them on why they need t

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes. Walter Reed is an army hospital, or a joint one. It's a DOD hospital. If you went down the road for an hour and a half to Richmond, you'd see the McGuire VA Medical Center, one of our polytrauma hospitals. You saw the Pentagon. McGuire VA Medical Center is the second largest

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, absolutely.