Health care is a top priority for our veterans and it's a top priority for my administration. The past four years, we've increased the VA medical care budget by 51 percent, and we're using those resources to make real improvements for our veterans. Over the past four years, we've increased total outpatient visits from 44 million to 55 million. We've increased the number of prescriptions filled from 98 million to 116 million. Since January 2002, we've reduced the backlog of disability claims by 20 percent. Claims are now being processed 68 days faster. By the end of this year, we plan to cut another 15 days on the average turnaround time.

We place a special focus on treating men and women returning from combat, and veterans with service disabilities and lower incomes and special needs. In the last two years, we've committed more than $1.5 billion to modernizing and expanding VA facilities, so more veterans can get care closer to their homes. My administration is helping the veterans who fought and sacrificed for America to get the quality care they deserve.

We're also getting results for veterans beyond the health care system. For more than a century, federal law prohibited disabled veterans from receiving both their retired pay and their VA disability compensation. Combat-injured and severely disabled veterans deserve better, and I was honored to be the first President in more than 100 years to sign concurrent receipt legislation.

We've also expanded grants to help homeless veterans in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. No veteran who served in the blazing heat or bitter cold of foreign lands should have to live without shelter in the very country whose freedom they fought for. You defended our flag in uniform; you continue to defend the flag today.

I share the VFW's strong support for a constitutional amendment to protect the American flag. In June, the House of Representatives voted to ban flag desecration, and I urge the United States Senate to pass this important amendment this year.

At this hour, a new generation of Americans is defending our flag and our freedom in the first war of the 21st century. The war came to our shores on the morning of September the 11th, 2001. Since then the terrorists have continued to strike — in Bali, in Riyadh, in Istanbul, and Madrid, and Baghdad, and London, and Sharm el-Sheikh and elsewhere. The enemy, the terrorists, are ruthless and brutal. They're fighting on behalf of a hateful ideology that despises everything America stands for.