WASHINGTON The Department of Veterans Affairs' reputation for providing good health care can't stand many more thrashings like the one it took at a congressional hearing this week.

The House Committee on Veterans' Affairs met in Pittsburgh on Monday to hear testimony about problems with health care at agency facilities in that city and others.

"What you're about to hear may be painful," Chairman Jeff Miller, R-Fla., warned the audience as the hearing, which can be viewed online, began.

It was so painful that the first witness had trouble getting through her statement.

Brandie Petit spoke through sobs about her brother Joseph, who injured his knees during parachute training as a U.S. Army Ranger. After he had sought VA's help for years, the agency finally said "the problem was in his head and sent him home with meds for his head, not his knees," she told the panel.

At one point, Joseph, who suffered hallucinations, was forced to leave a VA facility, according to Petit, because he didn't have an appointment.

"The VA police physically removed Joseph and put a standing order into place to arrest him if he showed up again without an appointment," his sister said. "I'm outraged at his treatment that day."

Joseph committed suicide in the Atlanta VA Medical Center in Decatur, Ga., in November, "locked in a hospital bathroom dead in his wheelchair, a plastic trash bag tied over his head with a blue cord around his neck," reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

His case calls to mind my colleague Steve Vogel's story about Daniel Somers, once a Humvee turret gunner in Iraq. He became so frustrated with his attempts to get VA medical and mental health treatment that he felt the government had "turned around and abandoned me."

He wrote those words not long before he shot himself in the head on a Phoenix street in July. The note to his family said he was "too trapped in a war to be at peace, too damaged to be at war."

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VA's reputation for health care takes a thrashing