A panel of speakers at a Tuesday “Voices for Veterans” event recently agreed that America has a moral obligation to care for members of the military after they have completed their service.

The panelists’ remarks were in response to a question by moderator Michael McElroy, a political correspondent at Cardinal & Pine, the North Carolina online publication that hosted the event for the purpose of “supporting North Carolina’s veterans and military families.”

Big VA cuts spark big worries

The comments came amid concerns about steep staffing cuts at Veterans Administration hospitals. VA staff and supporters contend proposed cuts will hinder the ability to adequately care for veterans. More than 80,000 positions — just over 17% of the roughly 470,000 people it employs — could be eliminated as part of a major restructuring of the federal government’s second largest department.

The Trump administration is thinking about numbers and not people when it proposes such deep cuts to the VA, said Ann Marie Patterson-Powell, a VA nurse.

“They’re not looking at the human side of it. Patterson-Powell said. “We promised those who signed up and left their families, their homes — everything behind — to serve the country. We said, ‘If you do this for me, we’re going to take care of you when you come back.’”

The nation must do for veterans what it said it would do with “no strings attached, with no arguments, with no pushback,” Patterson-Powell said.

Dr. Kyle Horton, founder of On Your Side Health, a nonprofit that addresses health care disparities and works to improve veterans’ care, said the nation has a sacred obligation to protect those who serve.

“Those who wrote a blank check in service to this country with their lives do not deserve to be penny-pinched by Washington bureaucrats,” Horton said.

Horton added: “They don’t deserve to be penny-pinched by Captain Bone Spurs...

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