Paul on veterans bill: ‘It’s not always easy to make these judgments’

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) discussed his choice to vote against the Honoring Our PACT Act on Tuesday, which expanded benefits for veterans who are suffering illnesses due to toxic exposures.

During an interview on Hill.TV’s “Rising,” said it is important to have a “link of causation” when analyzing what type of care to provide to veterans as Veteran’s Affairs (VA) only pays for military-related injuries or diseases.

“It’s one thing to say ‘yes, we should take care of people who have an injury related to something that happened in the military,’ but its important to have some kind of link of causation,” Paul said.

He said while people can argue that the VA should “take care of everything,” he stipulated that injuries or diseases must be service connected.

“The military, though, has always had sort of rules on what they take care of,” he said. “So if you lose your leg in war, they take care of you for the rest of your life for that. If you lose your leg in war, and when you are 65 you developed hyper-tension, the VA doesn’t.”

“The reason we do this is not because people say ‘I don’t want to help veterans,’ the reason we do this is there’s a finite amount of resources,” he said.

Paul said if there is higher incidents of something, such as higher incidents of hper tension in people who had burn pit exposure, there can also be higher incidents of other type of behaviors as well, noting that there may be stronger arguments for respiratory illness.

“Its not always easy to make these judgements,” he said.