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03:16 - Source: CNN
Washington CNN  — 

Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton, a Marine Corps veteran, said he disagrees with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and President Donald Trump’s recent claims that the Department of Veteran Affairs isn’t in need of fixing, arguing Sunday that the department “is broken.”

Last week, Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, and the President appeared to agree with one another on the state of the department after Trump tweeted that Ocasio-Cortez was “correct” in recently saying of the VA: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

“I do disagree. The VA is broken. Now, there are some parts of it that work pretty well,” Moulton, who represents Massachusetts, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

He continued: “And I’ll give you a good example. If I have a prescription at the VA and I need to get it refilled, I can go online, log in, check a box. It shows up two days later in the mail and it doesn’t cost much because the VA actually negotiates drug prices with the pharmaceutical companies, which is what Medicare should do but it doesn’t.”

Moulton, who is also a 2020 presidential hopeful, told Tapper that veterans “deserve the best health care in the world – period. And it’s clear they are not getting it.” He added that the privatization of health care for veterans “should be an option” if the department is unable to sufficiently care for them.

“It doesn’t mean that we should just dismantle the VA. If you ask veterans, they want to fix the VA,” Moulton said. “They want to improve the VA. We don’t want the VA to go away, we just want it to work better. And it’s not working right now, so don’t tell me the system isn’t broken.”

CNN’s Eli Watkins contributed to this report.