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War comes at an agonizing cost. Our nation mourns the service members who paid the ultimate sacrifice, and our hearts ache for the veterans who have lost limbs and bear scars from their service.
These are the physical markers of the hazards from the battlefield, but not all the hazards of war are left behind when a service member returns home. Unfortunately, we have learned from generations of veterans the creeping, silent danger of toxic exposures.
Toxic exposures have come in the form of mustard gas, Agent Orange and, for post-9/11 veterans, burn pits.
The toxins troops breathe in or touch during their service leave veterans at risk of developing severe and even deadly illnesses after they take off the uniform. While they are harder to detect and delayed in onset, the illnesses caused by toxic exposure are a cost of war.
As a nation, we have a responsibility to care for our veterans and offer the help they need to heal or bear the wounds of war. Through the advocacy of toxic-exposed veterans and their family members, Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., and I created legislation that would provide toxic-exposed veterans with health care to treat and prevent illnesses brought about by their service.
This week marks two years since the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring Our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics, or PACT, Act was signed into law.
The PACT Act has delivered Department of Veterans Affairs health care and benefits to generations of toxic-exposed veterans, spanning from Agent Orange in Vietnam, to more than 3.5 million post-9/11 veterans who were exposed to burn pits and other toxins in Iraq and Afghanistan.
During these past two years, more than 1 million veterans and survivors have received compensation benefits from the VA, and more than 300,000 veterans have enrolled in the VA health care system. In my state, more than 15,000 veterans have been granted compensation benefits, and almost 4,000 have enrolled in the VA health care system under the PACT Act.
The PACT Act also made critical investments in research to make it easier to identify and treat conditions related to toxic exposure. Because of this law, toxic-exposed veterans and their families are finally receiving the support they deserve, and the VA is better equipped to care for them.
Implementing legislation as expansive as the PACT Act is not an easy task, and turning the text of the law into meaningful programs for veterans has been fraught with challenges. The VA is responsible for implementing the law, as Congress intended, and being good stewards of the taxpayer dollars Congress has provided.
One provision I fought for requires every veteran enrolled in the VA health care system to be screened for toxic exposure. This is vitally important to make certain that VA clinicians are aware of exposures their patients may have experienced and are able to proactively address them. The VA has conducted more than 5 million of these screenings since the PACT Act became law. However, according to reporting by Military.com, many veterans are dissatisfied with the screenings, and it remains unclear whether they are being used to guide care and treatment or simply check a box in the veteran's medical record.
Furthermore, in May, the VA Office of Inspector General found that the department had improperly diverted $10.8 million in PACT Act funds to increase salaries of senior executives in the VA Central Office in Washington, D.C.. This is unacceptable and an unethical use of federal funds.
Most concerning of all, the VA recently announced a $15 billion shortfall in the department's health care and benefits accounts -- a shortfall that the department hid from the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee for months. Mismanagement of taxpayer dollars could have a severe impact on all veterans, including those depending on the PACT Act.
These challenges must be addressed, but they do not detract from the importance and legacy of the PACT Act. Congress and the veteran community fought too hard, for too long, to do right by toxic-exposed veterans and the families they left behind only for this legislation to be hindered.
We owe it to them -- and to generations of veterans still to come -- to make certain that the promise of the PACT Act is fulfilled and never forgotten.
-- Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., has served on the Veterans Affairs' Committee during the entirety of his time in Congress, first in the House and now as the ranking member of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee.
