Our nation has a fundamental obligation to fulfill
its promises to those who sacrificed to protect our freedom. As
Congress moves to ensure that our budgets help shrink –
not expand – the deficit, I believe that veterans’
services and benefits should be given top priority among domestic
functions. That’s what Congress did last year, when –
to ensure that we stayed within our budget limits – we cut
spending by one percent in every general revenue-funded program
area except one -- veterans’ assistance and benefits.
Even though veterans’ issues are being used
more than ever before as the basis for political attacks, Members
of Congress proved last year that we could act quickly and in
a spirit of bipartisan cooperation when prompt action is necessary.
For example, on June 23, 2005, the Department of
Veterans Affairs abruptly announced that it had drastically underestimated
the amount it would need for veterans’ health care –
by $1.5 billion for the fiscal year then under way and by nearly
$2 billion for the fiscal year that began last October.
I quickly joined with colleagues in the Senate
leadership to introduce and pass an emergency $1.5 billion appropriation
to ensure that care for veterans would not be compromised. And
on September 22, 2005, the Senate – with my support –
passed a VA funding bill that includes an additional $3.4 billion
for the VA during the current year.
More and more veterans are making Arizona their
home for some or all of the year. The 2000 census determined that
there are 562,916 veterans in Arizona, and that 15 percent of
our civilian adult population is composed of veterans. With our
state continuing to grow, these numbers are up since that census
was taken and will continue to rise in the years ahead.
Because the veterans’ health-care system
was initially slow to respond to these demographic changes, I
worked with Senator McCain to craft a framework called the Veterans'
Equitable Resource Allocation (VERA) system. First adopted as
part of the 1997 VA funding bill, our initiative established a
new funding formula to ensure that veterans who have similar eligibility
priority and economic status have similar access to VA medical
care around the country.
The VERA system ensures that funding is distributed
based on the eligible veterans population in a state and region,
rather than on historic funding patterns that do not reflect the
movement of veterans from one part of the country to another.
Under the new system, the VA administrative unit that serves Arizona
has seen its funding increase by 81.7 percent.
