[inaudible conversations] next day here in looking how veterans are transitioning to civilian life. In a washington journal segment on the destruction of chemical weapons and later a discussion about brain injuries and the elderly. A lot of people dont know how difficult it is. I dont know one person may be in this room that can juggle the things me and my husband have to juggle every single day with having three children on medical disabilities going back and forth to work sometimes maybe having too taken under the table job just to bring in extra money. There isnt a lazy bone in my body. There are many people that live in the inner city under the Poverty Level that are not easy. We want to be a part of the conversation. We want to have fulltime jobs and go to school and go to college and things like that and i actually believe that certain people just put the stamp of sleazy on us and to put a smoke screen that could not can not be able to see what is really going on. To point the fi
And part of which was a reality. We also dealt very closely on the issues of detentions. This goes again to this issue of president karzai seeking to establish and to reinforce the sense that afghanistan was a sovereign country and to wrest from the United States and other countries the kinds of respect due to that country and due to its people, and as we negotiated a contentious mou for my turning over of several thousand afghan detainees to afghanistan, that process and that sense of sovereignty came home in a very real way for me. And then, unfortunately, when president karzai abrogated parts of the mou, i had to cease the turnover of detainees until such time i was sure that they werent going to be released ultimately to target us or afghan citizens of the afghans again. We also had a period of time where we worked very closely on night operations and special operations, and that resulted in a memorandum of understanding as well where we sought to move from being unilaterally engag
Once they get into the system they are happy with the service. Can you speak to the article that is just coming out today and whether or not you would be willing to do an oped piece because i think its important that veterans are not we are definitely headed in the right direction. Yes maam. I actually met with the comptroller general and we were talking about whether or not he should put va on the highrisk list. I encouraged him to and the reason i did that as we are a Health Care System and we are going through a large amount of change right now. During that time and the Organization Goes through a large amount of change we need to make sure that we have the appropriate oversight, the leadership as well as those responsible for it so while i think the va system is absolutely essential to american medicine we trained 70 of u. S. Doctors. We have developed innovations that are critical for american medicine, the first liver transplant, the first implantable pacemaker, nicotine patch an
I want to commend dr. Wenstrup for bringing up the cost of care and thats something im very concerned about and i wanted to ask a few more questions about when you think you are going to have an idea or is this independent review of the va system, is that going to help look at that number because i know im very concerned about it and continuing to implement access to care locally and can you elaborate on that a little bit . Sure. In addition to the external independent assessments which we anticipate will be here around august or before then we are commissioning internal work, internal contracts and so forth from some of the leaders in the industry to figure out how do we get to some of the questions you raised in your recent hearing when he presented and so forth. One of the issues we struggle with in terms of cost is this reliance factor for some veterans use va for some of their needs but they go outside for others. My uncle recently told me he got his hearing aid but by and large g
With the cuban people. One thing they need is our technology. They have fallen behind us. They need access to more of our products such as Farm Equipment. We have some limitations as what we can ship to cuba. One thing we found, for example we took gifts of fencing tools and a set of wrenches down to them. If some of the professionals that were on our trade delegation werent sure if that was a very good gift to take when we took it to the farmers, they had had tears in their eyes that they went and the subsequent trade mission, they showed us all the fences that were built with our tools that we took down because we understood what their needs are. So as we get some efficiencies in our shipping, and bring our farmer to farmer interaction, we will improve their productivity which will increase the demand for our u. S. Goods. Do you have anything to add . Ill echo on to that. I think sometimes our biggest restriction on trade with cuba may be us and not them. And you have the power to wo