CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Courage or Complicity: Which Vets on the Ballot Are Defending VA Care?

Photograph Source: Beyond My Ken – CC BY-SA 4.0

In this crucial mid-term election year, men and women who served in the military are wooing voters by presenting themselves as tougher, more effective foes of MAGA incumbents and even long-serving Democrats.

In Massachusetts, a 50-year old former Marine captain, whose career has inspired other vets to run for office, is playing the vet (and youth) card in his September 1 primary challenge to nearly 80-year -old Senator Ed Markey. 

“We can’t just have people who seem like tired old Democrats,” says U.S. Representative Seth Moulton, who is giving up his House seat to challenge Markey. To illustrate his point, Moulton recently did some rhetorical muscle-flexing in May, when a fellow post 9/11 combat vet—DOD Secretary Pete Hegseth— told a Congressional hearing in May that the U.S. war on Iran was “an astounding military success.”  

Across the country, other anti-MAGA “service candidates” have questioned billions in new Pentagon spending on another Middle Eastern war—and criticized a simultaneous Trump assault on domestic social programs, immigrants and labor, civil liberties and voting rights, and environmental protection. 

Unfortunately, not every Democrat who served in the military is equally vocal about saving the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) from a failed bi-partisan experiment with privatization that began a decade ago, under the Obama Administration. During Trump’s second presidency, not only is public provision of healthcare for nine million former service members at risk; so are the good union jobs for 100,000 veterans employed by the (VA) as their caregivers.

Where politicians stand on the issue often reflects their own class background, rank in the military, and material circumstances after they return to civilian life.

Undermined by Outsourcing

As reported for years by CounterPunch, the direct care capacity of the VA has been seriously undermined by out-sourcing to the private healthcare industry. Most Democrats then in Congress—like Moulton– helped President Trump pass the VA MISSION of 2018, one his biggest first-term legislative victories. This accelerated a disastrous shift from inhouse to private sector care via the Veterans Community Care Program (VCCP).

Since then, tens of billions of dollars–which should have been spent on the VA’s own high-quality, specialized treatment–has instead diverted to over 1.7 million private doctors and hospitals. This coming year, nearly a third of all VA spending on medical services will be diverted to Medicare-style reimbursement of outside vendors, who have less training and experience caring for veterans. 

As a new RAND study found, vets referred outside the VA had only marginally improved access, while the cost of their care increased. In Massachusetts, the Boston Globe  found that Bay State VA facilities are suffering from staff cuts, fragmentation of patient care that was much better coordinated when delivered inhouse and longer in-house wait times, and.   

 As noted below, vets who come from working class backgrounds and/or held blue collar jobs need VA care and benefits far more than former members of the officer class. The latter include Hegseth and Moulton, who graduated from Ivy League schools and then did post-graduate work at the same one (Harvard) before, respectively getting hired as a broker on Wall Street or corporate manager. 

So it’s not surprising that neither appreciates the importance of VA care to lower-income vets; instead, both men believe that “government healthcare” has failed and favor its privatization. In contrast, U.S. House candidate Joanna Mendoza’s defense of the VA is personal, powerful, and reflects her poverty-stricken past as the daughter of immigrant cotton-pickers in Arizona. 

In her race against House Member Juan Ciscomani, a pro-Trump Republican, she is playing up a resume that includes combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus serving as a rare female drill instructor in the Marines. As she told the Times last month, she was sexually assaulted twice by fellow members of the Corps (only one of whom was punished) and, as a result, struggled with alcohol to the point of getting busted for drunk driving in 2012.

 She’s sober now and “a queer single mother,” who gets her healthcare from the Tucson VA Medical........

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