Sen. Blumenthal: I Regret Voting to Confirm Doug Collins for VA Secretary

EXCERPT:

BLUMENTHAL: “I do regret it. It was a mistake. In fact, I’ve apologized to the voters of my state of Connecticut, my constituents, because he made promises and commitments that he’s failed to keep. And right now, what we have in effect is a war on veterans, the cuts in funding, the freezes in hiring, the firings of workers are impacting health care in real time for real people. And so, the lesson here for me is trust but verify, but don’t trust, based on the lack of verification that the leaders so far confirmed by the Senate have given to us. I am going to continue to fight to restore health care. the VA has provided the gold standard and veterans are rightly happy with it. But if those positions of surgeons, nurses, counselors, schedulers are unfilled, or if those people are fired, there are 400 — 40,000 unfilled positions. 83,000 will be fired. We are going to see a degradation of our VA health care system and a failure to fulfill our obligation to provide disability benefits, for example, under the PACT Act, compensation that we own — that we owe to our veterans who have earned it.”