There are 22 million veterans in the United States. The VA provides 6.5 million veterans a year with health care. The VA has got to be accountable. It has also got to be efficient. We have also got to ascertain what the problems facing the veterans community and their families are and do everything we can to make sure that the VA is on the kind of position that it needs to be to address those problems. Of the 2 million men and women who served our country, put their lives on the line in Afghanistan and Iraq, studies suggest that 20 to 30 percent have come home with PTSD or TBI. Simply stated,...

When men and women go off to war they are not going to get ripped off at home, not by financial institutions and not by people trying to take advantage of benefits which they have earned. People go off to war, families are left with kids, they are struggling back home, they are vulnerable, and we are not going to allow those people to be taken advantage of. Violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA) have occurred within the mortgage lending industry within the past few years. In a 2012 report, the GAO identified over 14,000 instances of financial institutions failing to properly...

Within the veterans' community-and in fact, throughout the U.S. both in the public sector and the private sector-we face a very serious problem of overmedication. The result of that overmedication is significant numbers of people treated in the Department of Defense facilities, VA facilities, and in the private sector become dependent upon those medications intended to help them and ease their pain. It has been estimated that as many as 50 percent of male veterans and as high as 75 percent of female veterans-OEF and OIF veterans-struggle with pain. The prevalence of chronic pain will likely...