Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Florida, whose district covers Northwest Florida, recently broke with a majority of his Republican colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives to vote in favor of a bill that would expand eligibility for medical treatment for veterans exposed to toxic materials.

A similar measure is moving through the U.S. Senate, meaning that before any bill is sent to President Joe Biden for his signature, House and Senate members will have to reconcile any differences in their proposals and get the resulting legislative proposal passed in both houses of Congress.

The House measure, the Honoring Our PACT Act  — PACT stands for "Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics" — passed that chamber Thursday by a vote of 256-174, with Gaetz among only 34 Republicans voting in favor of the bill.

All of the 174 votes against the proposal were cast by Republican lawmakers.

Those "nay" votes included Rep. Neal Dunn, R-Panama City, whose district includes Tyndall Air Force Base and a couple of Navy installations.

Florida's House delegation was split on the bill, with 15 representatives voting in favor of the legislation, including 11 Democrats along with Gaetz and three other GOP members, and 12 opposing it, all of them Republicans.

Broadly, the bill would expand medical care eligibility for veterans exposed to "burn pits" that produced toxins, as well as troops who experienced other toxic exposures, since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the United States. Those attacks launched the global war on terror that sent U.S. troops to Iraq, Afghanistan and other places around the globe. 

Gaetz's district includes a number of military bases and a significant population of military veterans, and there are indications that some of those veterans may have been exposed to the toxic materials covered in the legislation.

Specifically mentioned in the Honoring Our PACT Act is Uzbekistan, a central Asian nation that shares a short border with Afghanistan. The United States began leasing the Karshi Khanabad Air Base, a former Soviet Union air base located 90 miles from Afghanistan, from the Uzbek government in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks on America.

The base provided an attractive option for the U.S. to project military power into Afghanistan in the fight against Islamic extremist al-Qaida and Taliban forces, but the lease ended in 2005 as relations between the U.S. and Uzbekistan soured.

However, almost as soon as American military personnel began using the base in 2001, the U.S. Army was conducting both an environmental study and an intelligence review at Karshi Khanabad.

Those efforts uncovered a number of toxins and ground contaminants believed to have come from runoff from chemical weapons decontamination, an exploded missile storage facility and an abandoned fuel storage facility, as well as asbestos and low-level radioactive uranium present at the airbase prior to the U.S. arrival.

Veterans who served at K2 have been claiming elevated rates of cancer and other illnesses, a fact that was noted by the Okaloosa County Board of County Commissioners in late 2020.

In a letter written at that time to the area's congressional delegation, including Gaetz, as previous legislation on toxic exposures involving U.S. troops was under consideration, Okaloosa commissioners said they "believe that some of the soldiers in our community may have served at this location during this period (from Oct. 1, 2001, to the end of 2005)."

House and Senate efforts to address toxic exposures suffered by U.S. troops who served during the global war on terror were pushed by Biden in his State of the Union address last week, when he called on Congress to "pass a law to make sure veterans devastated by toxic exposures in Iraq and Afghanistan finally get the benefits and comprehensive health care they deserve."

Biden went on to say that providing veterans who suffered from toxic exposure with such care is part of "a sacred obligation to equip all those we send to war and care for them and their families when they come home."

Source: https://www.nwfdailynews.com/story/news/politics/government/2022/03/08/matt-gaetz-votes-favor-house-bill-medical-treatment-troops-veterans-exposed-toxic-materials/9373907002/