"Let me start by telling you something I haven't done," said Rep. Coffman (R-Colo.), a Marine Corps combat veteran. "I have never run a federal agency that tolerates corruption the way the VA has. I've never built a hospital that's years behind schedule and hundreds of millions over budget. And I've never been a shill for inept bureaucrats who allowed American heroes to die on a medical waiting list while waiting for medical care."
This statement comes from Coffman's response to Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald, after a heated exchange during a recent budget hearing. There are many uses of the term "combat veteran." The broadest sense of the word - that a member served in active duty in a geographical area designated as a combat zone - is used for tax exemption purposes. A narrower definition is used for veterans to receive health benefits. It is a vague title that can be interpreted in different ways within the veteran community. But when it comes to Coffman's record, he is a combat veteran in the most literal and widely-understood use of the term. The criteria for the Combat Action Ribbon that Coffman received requires proof he was in actual combat operations. Without having been there with him, this is the best measure to confirm his experience. Coffman's combat statement is true.
Misleading statements on National Institutes of Health
Sen. Rand Paul made several misleading statements about the National Institutes of Health and some of the research that it funds. Paul claimed the NIH's budget has been increasing "for years." That's not accurate even in raw dollars. And when adjusted for inflation, the budget has actually decreased over the last decade. When inflation is taken into account, no increase in funding is evident in the last decade. The $27.2 billion in 2003 is equivalent to almost $35 billion in 2014 dollars, when the NIH budget was just over $30 billion. In other words, the NIH budget has actually decreased by almost $5 billion over the last decade in inflation-adjusted dollars.
He also suggested the NIH wasted $1 million on a study of whether male fruit flies (Drosophila ) prefer older or younger females, and in the process he belittled the impact of basic research using flies - which has yielded dozens of discoveries and even a few Nobel Prizes over the last century. "The fruit fly has been pioneering research," Hugo Bellen, a Drosophila expert at Baylor College of Medicine, told Factcheck. Drosophila "has led to the discovery of genes that cause cancer, genes that (affect) metabolism, genes that cause developmental defects, genes that play a critical role in neurodegeneration. It has been a discovery tool for many, many different pathways, proteins, diseases." Bellen has written extensively about the history of fruit fly research, and he said that about 8,000 genes in the fruit fly are "conserved" in humans, meaning humans have a number of essentially the same genes as flies. The "conservation" of so many genes from flies to mice and even to humans has helped us make incredible discoveries in a wide range of fields. These basic mechanisms have been very well conserved in evolution and thus this has been a very efficient, cost-effective and ethical way to gain this knowledge." "You get 10 times more biology for a dollar invested in flies than you get in mice," Bellen said, thanks to the ease with which their genes can be manipulated. Paul is entitled to his opinions on where government funds are best spent, but the study of flies has yielded important benefits to human health.
Chip Tuthill lives in Mancos. Websites used: www.factcheck.org www.politifact.com