LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Funding the VA

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Submitted by Mike Nelson

Veterans issues are often highly politicized, especially around this time of year. You know, it’s election season and incumbents or would-be politicians are depending on your vote; charging things up by invoking patriotism and military service is what they know to do. But for the veteran, their experience receiving healthcare following their service is often much less star-spangled than the campaign trail.

For all of its faults, the VA is doing more for veterans today than was imaginable 40 years ago. But there remains a glaring void of VA services in many more rural areas where, coincidentally, veterans also call home. Since the 1940s, the VA has offered one variation or another of a program designed to link veterans with private, contracted providers in their community. This can be greatly beneficial to, say an aging veteran living in Snowville, for example, who might not have to drive all the way to Salt Lake City for their care.

Programs such as the Veterans Choice Program are being overhauled, their budgets analyzed and the talk of privatization of the VA runs rampant in veteran circles. The VA has been in absolute chaos, as far as leadership goes, since the 2016 election with a new interim secretary every time you turn around. In that chaos, politicians have continued their desperate reassurance to veterans that they are in no way attempting to privatize the VA, even though it has been a long-standing goal of string-pullers like the Koch Brothers.

While politicians discuss how to best fund the VA and to continue programs to reach veterans in more rural communities, I urge them to stop playing games with veterans’ healthcare as part of what seems to be a larger machination to privatize not only the VA, but other social institutions as well.