Talk of Closing Manhattan V.A. Hospital Prompts Campaign to Save It

by Paul Von Zielbauer
http://www.nytimes.com/

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November 12, 2003 - For the past 28 years, Julius E. Dixson, a songwriter who fought in Europe during World War II, has been taking taxis from his Midtown apartment to the V.A. Medical Center New York, the only Veterans Affairs hospital in Manhattan.

"I need this hospital," Mr. Dixson, who is 90, said as he waited for his weekly shot in the arm, which helps his blood circulation. The next closest V.A. hospitals are in the Bronx and Brooklyn. "I don't want them to close down. That's a long ways away, the Bronx. Brooklyn's a long way, too."

For now, he and 30,000 other veterans who use the hospital, at East 23rd Street and First Avenue, should not worry, federal officials say, because there is no plan - not yet, anyway - to close it. But the hospital, one of hundreds run by the Department of Veterans Affairs nationwide, is on a list of those the Bush administration has recommended studying to determine the impact that closing or service reductions would have on patients.

The talk of possibly closing the hospital has prompted many of New York's most powerful elected officials, including both its United States senators and several City Council members, to begin a campaign to keep it open. Yesterday - Veterans Day - those officials and several veterans' groups accused President Bush of seeking budget savings at the expense of war veterans at a time when American soldiers are being wounded and killed every day in Iraq.

"The Manhattan V.A. should be kept open," Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a telephone interview yesterday. She accused the administration of seeking to cut money for veterans' health care when "the long-term care needs of aging veterans is still an unmet obligation."

"Veterans are living longer, and we're making more veterans every day," she added, "with our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere."

Eleven senators, including Mrs. Clinton and three Republicans, have endorsed an amendment to a Senate bill authorizing next year's Veterans Affairs budget that would prevent cutting any services without first holding public hearings to allow veterans to voice their opinions.

Standing outside the Manhattan V.A. Medical Center yesterday, Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, a Manhattan Democrat who is also against shutting down the hospital, said she had gotten mixed public and private messages from Veterans Affairs officials about their plans for it. The department is scheduled to decide whether to study the impact of closing the hospital by the end of the year.

"Back-channel, they're saying, `Don't worry about it,' " Ms. Maloney said at a news conference to protest any effort to close the hospital. "But when I talk to the employees, they say they're slated to close."

Manhattan's V.A. hospital, a 166-bed center affiliated with the New York University Medical Center and the home of all the administration's cardiac and neurosurgical care in the greater metropolitan region, is regarded by medical experts as a star in the nation's constellation of veterans' hospitals.

If it closed, veterans who need inpatient care would be sent to a V.A. hospital in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, which is accessible by car or by subway-bus connection, Representative Maloney said. Outpatient care would be provided in New Jersey, she said.

Of course, the human backdrop to the political and medical debate over the wisdom of closing any veterans' hospital are the men and women who rely on them for health care. Veterans' groups are virtually unanimously opposed to any cuts.

"They would have to be out of their minds to get rid of this hospital," said John Rowan, the state president of Vietnam Veterans of America and an occasional patient at V.A. Medical Center New York, standing outside the hospital doors yesterday. "You got blue-ribbon doctors here."

Sidney Lamback, 90, a World War II veteran, said he walks across town every month or two from his apartment on West 20th Street to see his doctor and pick up his regular array of pills.

"These people live in Manhattan," he said of veterans who use the East Side hospital. "Why should they go to Brooklyn?"

Asked how he would get to the Brooklyn V.A. hospital, Mr. Lamback, who disdains not walking to see his doctors, thought for a moment, shrugged and said, "I'd have to fly."