[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 5]
[House]
[Pages 6235-6236]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             VETERANS CARE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, occasionally things happen when 
you're in Congress that make you so angry that you can't hardly stand 
it.
  I got a call this past week, Mr. Speaker, from a friend of mine from 
my childhood. And her brother is a veteran who was in the veterans 
hospital, and he was assigned to a community residential care program. 
That's where they put one of these veterans into a home in a 
neighborhood with other veterans, and they're supposed to be cared for.
  She told me that the place where he was being kept was not clean and 
that the room he was in had a window that was sealed shut. He took 
oxygen, and there were no signs or anything that dealt with the oxygen 
that he was taking. A dog in the house came into his room and chewed 
through his oxygen tube. He had to keep his door shut, so it virtually 
made him a prisoner in this house.
  There were four veterans in this house. And the attitude of the 
person who ran this home was not anything that you would call conducive 
to good care. The two sisters of his were very, very upset and they 
thought that he shouldn't be kept in this place, and they asked me if I 
would check into it. So I called the caseworker, a lady named Pat Erp, 
and she told me that everything out there was fine. I said I wanted to 
see for myself. So I went out to the house. By the time I had arrived, 
they had contacted the woman who owned the house, and she was very 
hostile and said she wouldn't allow me, even though I was a Member of 
Congress, to take a look at the circumstances under which Mr. English 
was living, that's my buddy from childhood, Paul English. I didn't want 
to press the case, so I called the director of the Roudebush Hospital 
in Indianapolis. He wasn't in, but I did get his assistant director, 
who was very nice, and he agreed to have somebody come out there and 
take a look at the situation.
  He came out with two ladies who were nurses there. And my childhood 
friend's sister went into the house with him to try to get his clothes 
and everything out of there so they could take him to her house until 
they found another place for him to be kept.
  They were hostile, the two nurses from the Roudebush Hospital were 
hostile. They evidently changed the cord on his oxygen equipment, and 
they said that nothing like that happened, and yet his sister saw that 
it happened and they were very upset.
  The room in the house was not clean. He had two towels in his room, 
both of which had holes in them, obviously older. And on the weekends, 
the caseworker said that the woman who took care of these veterans who 
were in her care would leave for the weekend and left a pot of food on 
the stove.
  This isn't the way that our veterans ought to be taken care of when 
they're in a community residential care program, so I decided to pursue 
it further. And I got a call today and I returned the call of a lady 
named Phyllis Beamon, who is the head of the Extended Care Unit at the 
Indianapolis Veterans Affairs Medical Center, the Roudebush Hospital 
today. And she indicated that everything was fine and that they've used 
this house and this caregiver since 1983. And I could only imagine what 
other veterans had to live with who lived in this house since 1983 and 
were given this kind of ``care.''
  I can't tell you how this affected me. I served on the Veterans 
Affairs Committee for 10 years. And I had heard

[[Page 6236]]

stories like this before, but I always felt that the veterans were 
getting the quality of care that we were paying for as taxpayers, and 
they were being taken care of. And yet my friend from my childhood was 
being mistreated, in my opinion.
  His sister finally got him out of there and took him to her house. 
And the day after she took him to her house, because of the stress he 
was under, he had a heart attack. He went to the hospital and they put 
two stints in him and he did survive.
  Don't misunderstand, Mr. Speaker, I think the people that serve in 
our veterans hospitals for the most part do an outstanding job. The 
nurses and the doctors who serve our veterans do a good job, but there 
are occasions when the care is not just less than adequate, it's almost 
criminally inadequate.

                              {time}  1915

  And this is one of the cases that really bothers me. And I'm going to 
call for a complete investigation of the Community Residential Care 
program and the people who provide it at the Indianapolis Roudebush 
Hospital, not because I don't think that most of the people who work at 
the hospital do a good job, because I think they do, but I think 
there's a dereliction of responsibility in this Community Residential 
Care program that needs to be corrected and it needs to be corrected 
very, very quickly.
  We shouldn't have a veteran in a room in a house with the windows 
sealed so he can't get out in the event of an emergency. We shouldn't 
have him taking oxygen with a dog that's going to come in the room and 
chew on his oxygen tube. We shouldn't have people that are leaving the 
premises unattended with four veterans in there on a weekend and 
telling their relatives, well, you ought to take him someplace else 
because there won't be anybody here, and if they are here, they leave 
the food on the stove so they can get their own food. And these people, 
many of them, are mentally challenged, like my friend is. He's had some 
psychological problems.
  Let me just say in closing, Mr. Speaker, this is something that needs 
to be addressed. There needs to be an investigation of the Community 
Residential Care program in Indianapolis, and if it's like this in 
other parts of the country, we need to have a national investigation.

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