I am a veteran and the last hospital and doctor I want to go to is a veterans hospital and doctor. Would you want to? Why should veterans be forced to go to obsolete hospitals? Why shouldn't they have a right to choose? Why would we make our veterans wait months to be diagnosed or treated? You wouldn't tolerate it. It's not right and it's not what was intended when the Veterans Hospitals were established. The veterans were supposed to get the best doctors and hospitals, not the worst. This idea of using a well-established, proven system makes common sense and it is ready to roll NOW. No years of development. No kinks to work out. Let's get it done now ...not 5 years from now!

My son Jacob has been diagnosed with extreme anxiety most likely due to Atypical Autism (PDD-NOS), ADD and/or Tic Disorder. He has been a "special needs" child since he was about 3 years old. Our medical insurance companies, Emblem Health and Blue Cross Blue Shield, have both denied him coverage for I.V. Sedation in the hospital to get his cavities fixed (2 cavities being really bad now). Her has been to 3 different pediatric dentists, with more than 7 office visits, has been under the nitrous oxide, and no one has been able to complete any of the dental procedures, due to my son's extreme anxiety, and also due to his sensory processing disorder, which is a symptom of the PDD-NOS. It has been strongly suggested not only by his pediatric dentists, but by his behaviorist and pediatrician as well, that for my son's best interest he should be put under I.V. sedation in an outpatient room in a hospital in order to complete all of the dental work that needs to be done! I think that all medical insurance companies should be mandated to cover this, so that my son isn't scarred for life by being held down in a dental jacket while he screams in a dental chair, scared out of his mind!! Please help me by signing this petition! I am sure there are a lot of mothers going trough this, and who cannot afford a $10,000 hospital bill! If I cannot help my child, I hope to help other families going through the same situation.

In 2008, I lost my son to a broken health care system. In North Carolina, our governor and legislature are refusing to move forward to fix that system and are withholding access to health care for 500.000 people. In this year alone, up to 2,800 will die -- eight every single day. Please urge our governor and legislators to be pro-life and expand Medicaid.

From the Aurora Sentinel: "Aurora U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, a Republican, as recently as January voted against a spending bill that would have set aside as much as $100 million for overtime and additional training for claims processors to reduce the growing backlog of veterans waiting for care. Coffman joined 66 other Republicans in the House, including Colorado congressmen Doug Lamborn, Cory Gardner and Scott Tipton, in voting against that appropriations bill. - See more at: http://www.aurorasentinel.com/news/despite-clear-calls-va-resignations-voting-records-vets-still-cloudy/#sthash.yi3yqSnt.dpuf"

Too many people are bringing their medical conditions and infectious diseases back to their communities once they are released from prisons. Government has an obligation and legal responsibility to reduce such spread of infectious diseases and other medical conditions that impact community healthcare costs and more important the lives of those infected by family members, friends, or neighbors who are exposed to such risks. Better medical care and a comprehensive community public health policy will reduce risks to our children and family members.

The Virginia GOP revealed last week that their repeated calls for a "clean" budget were disingenuous at best and an outright deception at worst. Days after engineering the resignation of a State Senator in order to grab control of the upper chamber, Republicans abandoned their oft-cited call for a "clean" budget and instead overtly threatened to torpedo the state budget unless the General Assembly agreed to legislation prohibiting future Medicaid expansion.

My finance has RP and it gets progressively worse He and many other RP patients' suffering ( many young people ) could be helped tremendously. This device has already helped many. My fiancé can't wait another 5 or 10 yrs.

To address the ever growing need for an adequate, intensive nationwide mental health program to aid in the prevention of deaths by gun violence. The safety of our schools and our public in general should be a top priority. Funding for background checks and a mental health data system and mental health treatment/intervention can come from increasing the sales tax on guns, since our government seems unable to stop the sale of guns, which often end up in the hands of the mentally ill.

Yes, fluoride occurs naturally in some waters and so do other toxics like lead and arsenic. What the dentists didn't tell you is public municipalities are using a synthetic waste version of fluoride, mostly scrubbed from the exhaust stacks of phosphate fertilizer plants. And it's not the pharmaceutical fluoride in toothpaste, which advises you to seek immediate help from a poison control center if you swallow anything larger than a pea size serving. There's a serious reason behind the warning. This is where real science legitimizes our concerns about what this halogen is doing to our teeth and body tissues. The dentists didn't explain that international peer-reviewed studies have confirmed fluoride eventually wears down the enamel of a tooth surface, rather than improving it. In fact, 41 percent of younger Americans now have some type of dental fluorosis, the pitting and discoloring of the teeth from an overexposure of fluoride. And it doesn't stop there. More international teams have found fluoride can negatively affect the thyroid, the brain, the nervous system, and is a proven contributor to bone cancer in young boys. Even the vaunted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a warning that fluoridated water should not be mixed with baby formula because its fluoride dose is 250 times greater than mother's breast milk. Should a public municipality be in charge of an individual’s oral hygiene? And if fluoridated water is in everything from processed foods to taking a shower, then managing the dosage is absolutely impossible. For the above reasons and a thousand more we move to stop the fluoridation of not only Sioux City but our entire surrounding area immediately. Signed concerned citizens.

At a time when the state government is deadlocked in a struggle to provide affordable health care to over 400,000 low income residents of the State of Virginia, it is unacceptable for a state Senator to abdicate his position or someone else to induce him to in what appears to be a direct quid pro quo transaction made in order to receive a state job for himself and an offer of Judgeship for his daughter . It is wrong both to make such an offer to obtain a political end and to accept such an offer to obtain a highly paid or powerful state position.

If true, this deal raises serious questions about Speaker Bill Howell and Terry Kilgore’s manipulation of government jobs as leverage to prevent closing the coverage gap for 400,000 Virginians. This isn’t the first time accusations have arisen regarding mismanagement and patronage at the Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission. In fact, in 2010 a commissioner was convicted of defrauding the Commission of $4M and a 2011 JLARC report questioned the Commission’s governance practices and called for better oversight. Virginians deserve answers over how state jobs were used as leverage in a political fight over extending affordable health care to Virginia families, and assurances that Tobacco Commission resources haven’t been misappropriated for political purposes under the current management. Join us in calling for an investigation right now.

Observation status is a designation used by hospitals to bill Medicare. As a result of this designation, more and more seniors are experiencing difficulties getting Medicare coverage for admission to skilled nursing facility (SNF), along with other billing issues. In fact, Medicare estimates show that 1.6 million seniors were placed in “observation status” during a hospital stay in 2011. This is a 69 percent increase over the previous 5 years. Medicare beneficiaries who have played by the rules and contributed their entire working lives to the program so that they can have peace of mind and be covered for medically necessary services should not find themselves incurring unexpected costs and having to hire attorneys to get the coverage they already paid for. One solution that would solve this situation is for Congress to pass the bipartisan bill Improving Access to Medicare Coverage Act of 2013, S.569 and H.R. 1179, introduced by Senators Sherrod Brown and Susan Collins and Representatives Joe Courtney and Tom Latham, which would amend Medicare law to count a beneficiary’s time spent in the hospital on “observation status” towards the three-day hospital stay requirement for skilled nursing care. The measure would also establish a 90-day appeal period following passage for those that have a qualifying hospital stay and have been denied skilled nursing care after January 1, 2013.