Veterans Healthcare Choices: Privatization and Its Negative Impact on Women Veterans

Seeking Women’s Health Justice, a subcommittee of MAPA’s Fund Healthcare Not Warfare campaign, examines women’s health from the perspective of justice – with the awareness that peace is a fundamental issue of health. The cost of U.S. militarism drains economic resources at the expense of health and lives. Through awareness and understanding of the culture that promotes war, we examine the intersection of peace and women’s health, which is justice. Our work offers paths of action that can be taken to oppose militarism and to nurture health and enhance justice.

In this webinar, veterans’ health care policy analyst Suzanne Gordon will delve into the Veterans Administration specialized efforts to treat female veterans, and how this care and expertise is being lost due to this transition to private sector care.

Case in point: one out of three women veterans has experienced some form of sexual harassment or assault during military service. Every VA mental health provider is required to take basic military sexual trauma (MST) training and some specialize in this area. However, the VA MISSION Act of 2018 established a private sector network, the Veterans Community Care Program, that contracts private-sector therapists who typically have no MST training.

For over a decade, opponents of the integrated healthcare system run by the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) have assured veterans that privatizing their care through widespread outsourcing to private sector providers will give them more healthcare choices, forming a new network of timely, high quality, and ultra-convenient care. But if more VA care is outsourced to the private sector, will veterans, in fact, enjoy “a vast array of healthcare choices,” as one privatization advocate claimed? Will they drive shorter distances for their medical or mental health appointments? And will they see reduced wait-times? Finally, are there really thousands of doctors, therapists, and other clinicians ready and able to care for the nine million American veterans currently enrolled in the VA? The Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI) released a comprehensive, 50-state report entitled: “Veterans’ Health Care Choice — Myth or Reality? A State- by- State Reality Check of the False Promise of VA Privatization.” It definitively answers these questions.

Suzanne Gordon is a senior policy analyst at the VHPI, an Assistant Adjunct Professor at the UCSF School of Nursing, and an award-winning journalist. She has authored or coauthored 11 books, the most recent being Wounds of War: How the VA Delivers Health, Healing, and Hope to the Nation’s Veterans. Together with Lisa Hayes, she has written a play about patient safety and teamwork entitled Bedside Manners.

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Read the report Veterans’ Health Care Choice — Myth or Reality? Click on Massachusetts in the graphic on this page to see the report for the Commonwealth.