Rubio Campaign Press Release - The VA Has A Rotten Core

An Op-Ed by Marco Rubio, originally published in the Orlando Sentinel 5/28/15

This week, the doors opened at the long awaited Orlando Veterans Affairs Medical Center on the Lake Nona campus. This was a welcome occasion for veterans throughout Central Florida, who will now be cared for in this new state-of-the-art hospital.

Although there is much to celebrate about this milestone, it also reminds us of the need for closer scrutiny of all that is going wrong at the VA. That includes all the problems encountered during the construction of this hospital, which finally opened three years later than originally promised and cost hundreds of millions of dollars over budget. This is not an isolated problem. Just last week, more problems emerged with the new Denver VA hospital project, which is already years overdue and had cost overruns of more than $1 billion.

Questions need to be asked, and people need to be held accountable for what amounts to broken promises to our veterans that squander precious resources. In the coming days, I will formally request that the Government Accountability Office conduct a stem to stern review of what went wrong, as well as all that went right, with the Orlando project. It's critically important that the VA learn from its mistakes and apply these lessons as it embarks on a major nationwide wave of constructing new medical facilities in accordance with last year's VA reform legislation that I helped turn into law.

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It is fitting that the new VA hospital in Orlando was opened during the week when we observed Memorial Day. We were reminded of all the heroes we've lost as well as those who have returned home from war forever changed, physically and mentally, and in need of life-long medical care that the VA is uniquely positioned to provide.

Let's honor their service by rooting out incompetence and mischief in the VA and making it a health system our veterans can believe in again.

To read the article in its entirety, please click here.