Published: 2015-08-05
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Excerpt from Proposed Veterans Health Legislation: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Hospitals and Health Care of the Committee on Veterans Affairs, House of Representatives, One Hundred Third Congress, First Session, September 22, 1993 The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 9:33 a.m., in room 334, Cannon House Office Building, Hon. Roy Rowland (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. Present: Representatives Rowland, Long, Edwards of Texas, Clement, Filner, Tejeda, Gutierrez, Bishop, Kreidler, Brown, Smith, and Everett. Opening Statement of Chairman Rowland Mr. ROWLAND. As you know, the President is launching his national health care reform proposal tonight, and we will hold a hearing on that subject next Thursday, September 30. The road to far-reaching reform is likely to be a long one, and there remain other important issues before us. So we scheduled this session both to follow up on important oversight work this committee initiated several months ago as well as to take up a number of important legislative initiatives. On June 29, we conducted a hearing on VA care of chronically mentally ill veterans. We learned that fully 40 percent of VA patients have psychiatric disorders, and almost half of those with schizophrenia - the most prevalent psychiatric diagnosis among VA patients - are service-connected for that disease. About 50 percent of all veterans hospitalized for psychiatric care receive that care from VA, yet care of these veterans has clearly been a poor stepchild in the competition for needed funding. As a follow-up to our hearing, I wrote to express my concerns on this subject to Secretary Brown and asked that the Department address this issue in its testimony today. I am pleased, therefore, that the Secretary has recognized the problem and is committed to addressing it. I look forward to getting more detail this morning on precisely what that commitment will entail. This morning's hearing will also take up a series of bills. Among those, H.R. 3082 aims to improve VA care to women veterans. Last November, the President signed into law a comprehensive health care bill. Public Law 102-585, which very substantially expanded the services and programs available to women veterans. H.R. 3082 would go further in order to remedy documented problems with VA's provision of care to women veterans. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
