[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 8]
[House]
[Page 10572]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




               REBUILDING DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS

  (Mr. BARROW of Georgia asked and was given permission to address the 
House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. BARROW of Georgia. Madam Speaker, I rise today in support of our 
work to rebuild the Department of Veterans Affairs. Last week, the VA 
released the first-ever nationwide comprehensive audit of the VA health 
care system, and the findings were eye opening, though not surprising. 
More than 100,000 veterans have either waited more than 90 days to get 
an appointment, or they never received an appointment at all.
  This week, Congressman Bill Cassidy and I introduced a bipartisan 
resolution calling on the Attorney General to appoint a special counsel 
to investigate the evidence disclosed in the course of the internal 
audit.
  If, as the report states, managers at the VA told their subordinates 
to doctor the books to make wait times appear shorter, then any 
employees who falsified these Federal records should be prosecuted to 
the fullest extent of the law.
  The House has already voted to hold the guilty parties responsible 
and to give VA patients the right to go outside the VA to get the care 
they need, when they can't get it inside the VA, but these are just the 
first few steps in a long march to get them the care they have earned.
  I urge my colleagues to support our resolution because we owe it to 
all those who gave us the best years of their lives.

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