How We Can Honor Our Veterans:

Provide Unconditional and Comprehensive Health Care Services

Nov 19, 2023

Apologies for the delayed posting schedule! I received my first (and hopefully, last), Covid-19 diagnosis last week and have been recovering rather slowly. Thus, a belated and brief post on the health care status of our veterans to mark Veterans Day in the U.S., sans the podcast—my voice isn’t quite up to it. Early next week, I should have an interview to re-post to you which I’m super excited about, so please keep a lookout!

Photo of a Civil War era soldiers’ hospital, Courtesy of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Mathew Brady, photographer.

“The VA health care system has grown from 54 hospitals in 1930, to include 150 hospitals, 800 community-based outpatient clinics, 126 nursing home care units and 35 domiciliaries.” U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs

The fairly basic research I’ve done for this post has turned what I thought I knew about veterans’ medical care on its head. I hope this information inspires you, whether a veteran, or family member or friend of a veteran (that’s probably all of us), to learn more about how the veterans’ health care system works, and its relationship with our traditional, profit-driven system of health insurance. Then you can decide whether our country is “thanking our veterans for their service” in substance, or in words only.

I’ve assembled a few readings that trace the history of both the Veterans Administration and its health care, and provide a general overview of the merits and pitfalls of its current health care coverage. I’m also adding questions at the end of each reading piece that I hope we can all think about and attempt to answer together.

— Let’s start with a brief history of the Veterans Administration provided by…the Veterans Administration — I don’t think their factual summary is biased, but let me know what you think. The one thing we do know is that the United States likely will need to keep expanding and consolidating the services offered by the VA, unless of course, we stop the wars. With each war, and improved battlefield medical attention, we have more veterans who need our help, and with each past war, what is now called the Veterans Administration has expanded its services.

[Veterans Health Administration] VHA evolved from the first federal soldiers’ facility established for Civil War Veterans of the Union Army. On March 3, 1865—a month before the Civil War ended and the day before his second inauguration—President Abraham Lincoln signed a law to establish a national soldiers and sailors asylum.
[Today], VHA operates one of the largest health care systems in the world and provides training for a majority of America’s medical, nursing and allied health professionals. Roughly 60 percent of all medical residents obtain a portion of their training at VA hospitals; and VA medical research programs benefit society at-large. [And the] VHA – the largest of the three administrations that comprise VA – continues to meet Veterans’ changing medical, surgical and quality-of-life needs. New programs provide treatment for traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress, suicide prevention, women Veterans, homeless Veterans and more.

https://department.va.gov/history/history-overview/

Question: Does the fact that the government funded, VA health care system provides training to about 60 % of our country’s medical residents mean that we are directly subsidizing private, for-profit insurance companies?

— This compilation of statistics and background information from Statista shows the number of U.S. veterans as of 2022 (over 16 million, down from about 17 million in 2019),and some of the physical and mental ailments common to veterans. In addition, Statista reports that approximately 13,000 veterans are homeless. But perhaps most startling is that a survey conducted from 1990-2022 shows the numbers of veterans, ages 18-64, that were covered by military health care plummeted during the last seven years — approximately 11 million of 16 million veterans had military health plans in 2022.

Supplementary notes from Statista : * Military health care includes Tricare and CHAMPVA (Civilian Health and Medical Program of the Department of Veterans Affairs), as well as care provided by the Health and Medical Program of the Department of Veterans Affairs and care provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the military.

Although physical injuries are often the first to come to mind when thinking about service-related injuries among veterans, some of the most common injuries and health problems reported by veterans during service after 9/11 include sleep problems, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and depression. In fact a survey of veterans and service members who incurred a physical or mental injury, illness, or wound while serving in the military on or after September 11, 2001 found that almost 83 percent reported experiencing PTSD.

https://www.statista.com/topics/3488/veteran-health-in-the-us/#topicOverview

Question: Why don’t 100% of honorably discharged veterans receive the same comprehensive health care?

— There are a number of private, (many non-profit) organizations that offer help to veterans. One is Disabled American Veterans (DAV), a non-prorofit that works together with the VA to help disabled veterans accomplish, among other things:

Providing free, professional assistance to veterans and their families in obtaining benefits and services earned through military service and provided by the Department of Veteran Affairs and other agencies of government….

Another link to DAV.org touts the effectiveness of the VA medical programs in a blogpost from July, 2023:

For the harshest critics of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Veterans Health Administration (VHA), the storyline often shared in the media is convenient to their cause. Reported long wait times and an annual budget of $120 billion offer a target for outrageous headlines that call for VHA’s demise.
But these views contradict academic studies, patient experience surveys and VHA employee consensus that the health care system developed to care for our nation’s veterans is, in fact, high quality and irreplaceable.

It looks like there are critics on either side, but overall, it seems that the VA, through its Veterans Health Administration (VHA), is having a positive impact on veterans, their families and the general public through its extensive network of hospitals, other types of care facilities and extensive interaction with private health care providers.

Question: Why do veterans need assistance to fill out claim applications? ( I know the answer to this question from completing and then re-doing endlessly, claims to access other government benefits).

— Finally for today’s post, this article from the Cornell University Alumni Magazine shares an interview with Suzanne Gordon, a 1967 Cornell graduate who has devoted her career to studying veterans health care issues. Her most recent book published in 2022 is “Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends, and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs, …explores how serving in the military can impact people, and the issues that many former service members face in rejoining civilian life.”

Ms. Gordon’s answer to the following question basically answers the questions I’ve posed above.

How do you define a veteran, then?
Many people think a veteran is someone who was in combat. But I define it the way we do in the book: anybody who served in the active-duty military. Another common misconception is that all veterans are eligible for benefits. In the VA, access depends on the status of your discharge, whether you have a proven service-connected disability, or whether you have a sufficiently low income.

Note: It also depends on how adept you are at completing government forms and “making your case’ for access to government benefits. I understand the reasoning behind allowing only “veterans with an honorable discharge” to receive veterans’ benefits, but the fact that all veterans have to prove to the government that they have a “service-connected disability” and/or whether the veteran is poor enough to qualify for benefits is what upended my thinking about the Veterans Adminstration’s medical care. I wrongly assumed that all veterans automatically qualified for health care benefits.

https://alumni.cornell.edu/cornellians/gordon-veterans/

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I’d love to hear what you think about veterans issues, and I’d appreciate any answers to the questions I’ve posed about how we provide medical care to those who have served. Just leave your thoughts in the Comment Section below—thanks!

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