Chairman Bernie Sanders of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs has introduced critically important legislation, S. 1950, the Comprehensive Veterans Health and Benefits and Military Retirement Pay Restoration Act of 2014. If enacted, S. 1950 would accomplish many of DAV’s most important priorities and legislative goals based on national resolutions approved by our members.
This massive bill would create, expand, advance, and extend a wide array of VA benefits, services and programs that are important to DAV and to our members and their families. For example, responding to a call from DAV as a leading voice for wounded, injured, and ill veterans, it would create a comprehensive family caregiver support program for all generations of severely wounded, injured and ill veterans.
Also, the bill would fulfill DAV’s ongoing drive to enact advance appropriations for VA’s mandatory funding accounts to ensure that in any government shutdown environment in the future, veterans benefits payments would not be delayed or put in jeopardy.
This measure also would provide additional financial support to survivors of service members who die in the line of duty, as well as expanded access for them to GI Bill educational benefits. A two-plus year stalemate in VA’s authority to lease facilities for health care treatment and other purposes would be solved by this bill. Crucially, the bill would fully restore military retirement cost-of-living adjustments that were outrageously reduced in the 2013 House-Senate budget agreement and the subsequent appropriations act. These are but a few of the myriad provisions of this bill that would improve the lives, health, and prospects of veterans—especially the wounded, injured and ill—and their loved ones, if enacted into law.
Please use the prepared electronic text, or draft your own version, to urge your Senators to cosponsor and support this important bill, and to bring it to the floor of the Senate for a vote as soon as possible. Also, we have prepared a second letter for you in this message to send to your House member to urge enactment of H.R. 813, the Putting Veterans Funding First Act, an alternative bill that would establish advance appropriations for all VA discretionary accounts. Please send that letter as well.
As always, we appreciate your support of DAV and your grassroots activism in participating in DAV CAN, our Commander’s Action Network. Your advocacy helps make DAV a highly influential and leading organization in veterans affairs in Washington.
Thank you for all you do for America’s veterans and their families.
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