Jon Stewart pushes Congress to help veterans exposed to toxic burn pits
Comedian Jon Stewart spoke at a virtual roundtable of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee on Wednesday, urging congressional support for service members suffering from the effects of toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Video Transcript
JON STEWART: I just wanted to zoom out for a second, you know, as we're all talking about different funding and different bureaucratic fixes to just get a larger perspective on what the reality of this should probably be. The VA is instituting another bureaucratic process to decide if there are certain conditions which might meet the protocol and criterion that they're working to establish to make sure that a veteran in what is generally seen by the community as an adversarial process can tie the toxic exposure that he experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan to the conditions that they're suffering now.
And we want to talk about, do we have enough money-- there really should be one job here and one job alone. And that is, how do we implement first-rate toxic exposure health care for our Iraq and Afghanistan veterans so that they can receive in the way that the VA and DOD have gotten better with traumatic brain injury and PTSD, man, if you went down to Walter Reed in 2004, you'd have-- the adaptive rehabilitation there was two double amputees lying on a mat throwing a medicine ball back and forth.
And if you go in there now, it is world class. They have the world class corrective surgeries. They have world class prosthetics. They have world class technology and adaptive rehabilitation. But it took intention. And it took money. And we have to establish that for the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan because a toxic wound is an IED that goes off in your body 5 years later, 10 years later, 15 years later. And yet the burden of proof and scrutiny is always on the veteran.
And so, respectfully, when we talk about, hey, we just want to get him into health care now, access to a system that doesn't understand toxic exposure doesn't help anybody. There's a burn pit center for excellence at the VA. Its funding is $6 to $7 million a year. That's in 2022, 15 years after the DOD and the VA knew that this storm was coming. To give you just a perspective on that, they spend $90 million a year on Viagra. If a budget is a list of your priorities, I think that shows where everything stands.
So when I hear everybody say, well, we've got to get it right-- here's the problem with the VA. They're afraid of being overwhelmed. The only conversation we should be having is a collaborative effort to bring the VA together and create first-rate toxic exposure health care, and not health care first and benefits later because if you're sick with pancreatic cancer not having your benefit, what are you living on?
So the idea that we need to split everything up, and do it piecemeal, and create more bureaucratic processes on this is unacceptable. The bottom line is this. Our country exposed our own veterans to poison for years. And we knew about it. And we didn't act with urgency and appropriateness. And therefore we've lost men and women who served this country. They've died out of our inaction.
And so I just want to step back for a second. And don't worry so much about the protocol for a new disease and the things like that. Let's not lose the big picture because I know everybody here wants to do the right thing. And it's really appreciated. I just don't want to get lost in the sauce here.
