Making room for veterans ... in cemeteries
Today I’m writing about the Spokane VA Medical Center where war veterans with cancer are being told they now have to travel to Seattle or Portland for care. The hospital lost its cancer doc. Administrators think it could take 18 months to replace him.
During my research, I found this from a speech by VA Secretary Anthony Principi, delivered Feb. 2, 2004:
“VA is not only health care and benefits. We also have the important responsibility to honor our veterans in their final rest. The VA maintains our national cemetery program. The president's budget request will continue the greatest expansion in our national cemetery system since the Civil War. Five new additional cemeteries will be open very soon. These budget funds also advanced planning for six more national cemeteries in addition to maintaining the president's commitment to performing the long-deferred maintenance needed to recognize our national cemeteries as national shrines. When this expansion is completed, we will have expanded the national cemetery system by 85 percent, almost double the number of gravesites that we currently have. So, indeed, it is a very major expansion, and really critical because of the number of veterans, primarily World War II and Korea, who are passing from us at the rate of almost 1,800 a day.”
