Backed by US veterans groups, the bill would provide health benefits for US troops exposed to toxins in Iraq and Afghanistan.
US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has pledged to vote on long-awaited legislation that would provide health benefits for US troops suffering from possible exposure to toxins from to burn” in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Standing outside the US Capitol with comedian Jon Stewart and half a dozen family members of victims of such toxic exposure, Schumer promised that the US government would take care of sick veterans.
“Until now, we have refused to face one of the biggest costs of those wars, and that is the health care needs of the veterans who fought and sacrificed for us,” Schumer told reporters.
Burn pits were large holes dug in the ground, some the size of football fields, into which all manner of trash and debris from nearby US military bases was dumped and burned, sometimes with jet fuel.
The use of burning drill bits was common practice by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan during the wars that began in 2001 and 2003, respectively, potentially exposing 2.5 million US veterans.
“When there is war, there are all kinds of things that you are not aware of and people suffer,” Schumer said. “It’s our job to make sure we take care of them once they come back. And we’re not going to rest until we deal with the burn pits and all the other diseases that people got because they fought for us and risked their lives for us and risked their freedom for us.”
The “Honor Our PACT Act” reforms the procedures of the US Veterans Administration to allow the medical presumption that veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and who now suffer from cancer, as well as respiratory and heart diseases, have right to health care benefits.
“You see the entire veterans community coming together to do this,” Stewart also said during Tuesday’s news conference. “After 20 years of fighting, this is what finally comes down.”
To pass, the legislation needs at least 60 votes in the US Senate, where Democrats hold a narrow 51-vote majority with Vice President Kamala Harris acting as the tiebreaker.
Sen. Marco Rubio, a leading Republican, supported the bill, and Schumer sounded confident Tuesday that he has the votes. “We are at a turning point,” he said.
The bill passed the US House of Representatives by a vote of 256-174 on March 3 with the support of 34 Republicans.
The legislation is strongly backed by President Joe Biden, whose son Beau Biden served in the US military near burning pits in Iraq for a year in 2008-2009, and died of a rare brain cancer in 2015.
Biden pushed for the legislation to be passed in his State of the Union On March 1
While it is unknown if toxins from a burn pit caused his son’s cancer or that of many other soldiers, the US government should not wait to provide services to veterans in need, Biden said.
“When our troops came home, the fittest among them, the largest fighting force in the history of the world, many of them were not the same; headaches, dizziness, numbness, cancer,” Biden said in comments at a VA medical clinic in Fort Worth on March 8.
The problem is reminiscent of “Agent Orange” disease that arose among Vietnam War veterans who were exposed to the highly toxic defoliant sprayed over the country’s jungles in the 1960s and early 1970s.
The Vietnamese government said in 2007 that as many as three million Vietnamese suffered from birth defects and other health problems as a result of Agent Orange.
Burn-pit legislation is supported by major US veterans groups, including the Wounded Warrior Project, the Military Officers Association of America, the US Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the Disabled American Veterans.