Oct 23 2009
President Barack Obama "signed a bill [on Thursday] designed to keep funding for veterans' medical care steady during future budget negotiations," the Associated Press reports. Obama said the bill will guarantee predictable funding for the Department of Veteran Affairs.
"The White House said the change was needed to protect veterans' programs, given that Congress has been late 20 of the last 23 years in passing a budget bill. Aides say the uncertainty of the budget process harms those who have served in uniform" (10/22).
Ahead of the bill signing, ABC's Political Punch wrote that Obama was honoring a campaign promise by signing the Veterans Health Care Budget Reform and Transparency Act into law. "In a letter to the president of the American Federation of Government Employees in October 2008, then-Senator Obama promised that, if elected, his administration would support the legislation" (Phelps, 10/22).
 This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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