Removal of Beds From VA Hospitals.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this petition is to stop the removal or transfer of beds from VA hospitals in Canandaigua, NY and throughout our Nation.

The Veterans For Veterans Connections (VFVC) and the signers of this petition demand our President, the Congress, and the Department of Veterans Affairs take immediate action to stop the planned removal of beds from the Canandaigua, NY Veterans Hospital, as well as other desperately needed veterans care facilities across our Nation!

We, the veterans, and patients, and concerned citizens of the United States, hear by demand, that the Veterans Administration rescind the proposal by the CARES Commission's findings. http://www.carescommission.va.gov/reportdownload.asp
We demand that the proposed cuts for the Canandaigua VA Hospital halted. We are demanding the Department of Veterans Affairs increase funding and staff to the hospital.

We need every signature possible and every person to get involved and make their voice heard by contacting their elected officials and demanding that the Canandaigua VA hospital and others remain open and receive increased funding for operation. The American people say that they support our troops, now is the time to show that support. Make sure a soldier returning from Iraq and Afghanistan has a hospital to come home to for care. Please the link to this petition with emails to your friends, family and elected officials.

As citizens of the United States, we believe we owe a tremendous debt to our veterans, who have sacrificed their health, ability to work, care for themselves, and take care of their families. While there are many ways of showing our appreciation and gratitude to our veterans, one of the greatest ways is to ensure that our veterans have health care and necessary medical treatment to live their lives with dignity and without suffering. Our VA health care facilities provide the only means of medical service for many of our veterans and the level of care must not be reduced.
As stated on the Veterans Affairs website, http://www1.va.gov/opa/fact/docs/vafacts.htm, “VA has experienced unprecedented growth in the medical system workload over the past few years. The number of patients treated increased by over 9.5 percent from 2001 to 2002”. And with the current world situation and thousands of military personnel fighting in the Middle East, the numbers of veterans requiring medical help in the future is surely going to grow!

Dear Mr. President,
As citizens of the United States of America we would like to express our concern for veterans rights to medical treatment. It is quite obvious by the progressing trends in VA policy that health care is moving toward privatization. Quality of care is our concern. As the president you can appreciate our concern by looking at the quality of our Armed Forces. Please address this issue publicly. The INTEGRITY of our Armed Forces is being compromised! Let us offer to those who serve us the reality of quality health care for life. Let us be prepared with a quality Armed Forces through the incentive of quality health care!
Keep our VA Hospitals and stop removing our beds from these hospitals in New York and Texas also any where else in Nation. We ask for your support Mr. President, and as the Commander and Chief of our Armed Forces, we call to you to take care of our servicemen and women, and our veterans who need to know that medical care will be there for them.

We want mandatory spending not discretionary spending for Veterans Healthcare.



"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. but in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863