President Joe Biden shined the spotlight on toxic exposure legislation currently before the Senate during his Memorial Day address Monday at Arlington National Cemetery.
“We’re making progress in key areas on comprehensive, bipartisan legislation that is advancing in Congress that would develop health care services and benefits to veterans and their survivors impacted by toxic exposures,” he said.
Senate Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Ranking Member Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) recently introduced the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring Our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act of 2022 after months of work with colleagues from both the House of Representatives and Senate, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Biden Administration and Veterans Service Organizations.
The bipartisan legislation would deliver all generations of toxic-exposed veterans their earned health care and benefits under VA for the first time in the nation’s history. It would also create a framework for the establishment of future presumptions of service connection related to toxic exposure; add 23 burn pit and toxic exposure-related conditions to VA’s list of service presumptions, including hypertension; and expand presumptions related to Agent Orange exposure; Includes Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Guam, American Samoa, and Johnston Atoll as locations for Agent Orange exposure.
The legislation now heads to the Senate floor for consideration. If passed by the Senate, it then must be passed by the House before being signed into law by the President.
“We have a duty to do right by them and I’m determined to make sure our brave service families and members that served alongside them do not wait decades for the care and benefits that they deserve,” Biden said.
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Biden also spoke of his son, Beau, an Iraq War veteran who died of brain cancer that is suspected to have been caused by toxic exposure.
“For so many of you, as it is with Jill and me, the hurt is wrapped around the knowledge that your loved one was part of something bigger, bigger than any of us,” he said. “They chose a life of purpose. Sounds corny like a Memorial Day speech, but I mean it from the bottom of my heart. They chose a life of purpose.”
Biden said those who have given their lives in service to the nation had a mission in comments at the National Memorial Day Observance. Prior to speaking, Biden laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown.
“Above all, they believed in duty, they believed in honor, they believed in their country,” he said. “And still today we are free because they were brave. We live by the light of the flame of liberty they kept burning.”
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Biden noted that America’s service members are standing watch around the world at often great personal risk, with emotions still raw for the families of the fallen who died while serving over the past two decades.
“We’ve seen the hundreds of graves here at Section 60 at Arlington, reminders that there is nothing low-risk or low-cost about a war or the women or men who fight it,” he said.
Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery is the final resting place for many of the 7,054 American service members who died while fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021.
“Untold others died of injuries and illness connected to their service in these wars,” continued Biden. “The enduring grief borne by the survivors is a cost of war that we’ll carry as a nation forever.”
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Biden told the survivors the nation owes a debt to both them and the person they lost.
“We can never repay the sacrifice, but we will never stop trying,” he pledged. “We’ll never fail in our duty to remember. With their lives, they brought our freedom. And so with our lives, we must always live up to their example.”
He added that the only truly sacred obligation the nation has is to prepare and equip those it sends into harm’s way and to care for their families when they return home and when they don’t.
Biden also touched on Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine, saying it clearly shows what is at stake.
“Freedom has never been free, democracy has always required champions,” he said. “Today, Ukraine and its people are on the front lines, fighting to save their nation. But their fight is part of a larger fight that unites all people. It is a fight that so many of the patriots at rest in these hallowed grounds were part of. A battle between democracy and autocracy.”
Reach Julia LeDoux at Julia@connectingvets.com.