BY BRYCE COVERT
Aaron Hughes, who was deployed
to Kuwait and Iraq in 2003 and 2004, now has a serious, very rare lung
condition. But he told In These Times he gets “really outstanding
care” at the nearby Jesse Brown VA Medical Center. “The doctors are at the top
of their class,” he said.
Because his condition is so
rare, Hughes has been sent to a hospital outside of the Department of Veterans
Affairs (VA) for specific tests. And his taste of the private healthcare system
has been sour. “As soon as I went there, all hell broke loose,” he said,
explaining there were problems with sharing records between the two
institutions.
“With the VA system, when you
do tests, it’s all integrated.” Every doctor Hughes sees is aware of all the
other treatment he gets, from vision to mental health. The private hospitals,
on the other hand, often refuse to send the records back to the VA.
“The private sector isn’t
about sharing your information,” Hughes explained. “It’s not about healthcare,
it’s about ownership of care.”
Hughes thinks these problems
could get worse if efforts to fully privatize the VA are successful. President
Donald Trump has supported privatizing
the system, and has called to make permanent the Veterans Choice Program, an
experiment Congress launched in 2014 that gives vouchers to veterans to see
private doctors, while cutting other parts of the agency. These developments
have provoked concerns that Trump will usher in a full private sector
takeover.
“I worry that my care will
become a profit motive,” Hughes said. “And that means it’s not about me
anymore, it’s about making money.”
Now Hughes’ organization,
About Face: Veterans Against the War, has joined other veterans’ groups,
unions and healthcare advocates to launch a campaign to stop the privatization
of the VA. After several months of building the coalition, the mobilization now
includes Veterans for Peace, Service Employees International Union, the
American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and National Nurses United.
Healthcare advocacy groups including the Illinois Single Payer Coalition and
the Democratic Socialists of America Healthcare Working Group have also joined the
campaign. When the organizations came together on March 1 to hold a panel event
in Chicago, more than 100 people showed up.
The combination of unions and
veterans’ groups is potent. “We as veterans can argue and demand things and
raise issues that the unions can’t, and the unions can inform us about issues
that we don’t understand,” Hughes said. “We’re seeing outside, and they’re
seeing inside of the system. We’re able to have this inside/outside strategy
that I think is really a winning strategy.”
Organizers believe the time is
right to invest in that teamwork now. “It came to our attention last fall that
things under the Trump administration have been getting really bad,” Roberto
Clack, an organizer with the Right to Heal VA Campaign, told In These
Times.
“There are problems with the
VA, but the VA works,” Clack said. “It provides quality care for the people
that use it, and it saves lives.” A 2016 RAND Corporation analysis
found that the VA provides good quality care compared with other health
systems, usually in a timely manner. Private providers, on the other hand,
could expose veterans to lower-quality care, longer wait times and doctors who
aren’t familiar with military service.
“We agree that it could be
better,” Clack said, “but the way to make healthcare better is to have a fully
supported VA, funded VA, and staffed VA.”
Privatizing the VA wouldn’t
just risk veteran’s healthcare, however. It could also threaten the unionized
public sector employees who work for it. AFGE represents more than 700,000
federal workers, 250,000 of whom work at the VA. It would be “a serious death
knell for unionization in this country,” said Anne Lindgren, president of AFGE
Local 789.
Privatization is “absolutely
the wrong response,” Clack said. “Privatization’s not going to make anyone’s
healthcare better.”
But the idea that the VA
doesn’t work has become embedded many media reports and the general public.
“What we’re really up against is debunking the narrative that it’s just this
broken system,” Clack said.
So while the long-term goal is
to block the privatization of the agency, the short-term goal is to raise more
awareness. “We recognize that [stopping privatization] is a big elephant, and
you can’t eat an elephant in one bite, you need to eat it in small bites,”
Lindgren said.
“For that to happen we need to
educate and organize the public.”
After the launch event, the
groups held a call-in day to have people contact their members of Congress and
urge them to oppose a currently bill that would expand the Choice program. Next
will be actually visiting members of Congress. “Frankly we’re going to take
this to the streets and let not only Republicans know, but also Democrats who
are vacillating on this issue, you have to have a firm ‘no’ on privatization
efforts,” Clack said.
Participants also hope to
create an organizing model that can be replicated in other cities and
communities across the country. “We’re not going to win this fight if it’s just
a Chicago fight,” Clack said. “We definitely want to see this organizing spread
to other parts of the country.”
The goal is also to move their
efforts beyond just saving the VA from privatization to making a proactive
argument that the VA should be expanded and itself serve as a model for the
whole country. “I believe our community of veterans organized has the potential
to not just fight for our healthcare, but healthcare for everyone in this
country,” Hughes said.
That’s why the launch event
included activists who are focused on universal healthcare and a single-payer
system. “The VA really resembles the closest thing there is to a single payer
system in our country,” Clack said. It’s not just the largest hospital system
and healthcare provider in the nation, but it’s also the only system that
negotiates directly with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices, and it’s
also a one-stop-shop for veterans seeking all kinds of care, from mental health
to physical issues to social work.
“We really want to make a case
that the public sector provides quality services,” Clack said. “The VA’s a
great example of the public sector working.”
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