"Lawmakers explicitly ruled out the proposal Tuesday in budget recommendations from the Senate and House veterans' affairs committees.

The chairman of the Senate committee, Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, said a majority of the committee members rejected the plan as fundamentally unfair.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a senior member of both the Veterans Affairs and Budget committees, warned Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki last week that the idea would be "dead on arrival," and she vowed Tuesday that any budget containing the VA provision "is not going to pass."

"The VA has an obligation to pay for service-related care, and they should not be nickel-and-diming vets in the process," she said in an interview."