“We Have No One”: How Trump’s Dismantling of the VA Left a Veterans Hospital in Crisis
Despite the occasional scandal and persistent short-staffing, studies have shown that the VA — where the doctors coordinate with one another and have deep expertise on veterans’ needs — has better outcomes than private care.
Key points
- Six months after Trump entered the White House, the VA had 3,800 fewer doctors, nurses and other “mission critical” staff than it did at the start of his term, according to the department’s own data.
- Eric Umansky I’m looking for tips on the VA’s care of veterans, and I’m particularly interested in hearing from healthcare providers and others who work at VA hospitals.
- This, the reasoning went, would allow the government to cut thousands of needless bureaucrats while giving veterans more choices if the VA can’t provide the care.
But in his second term, Trump has moved aggressively to upend this system, embracing a decades-long conservative campaig n to effectively kneecap the VA’s government-run healthcare and shift veterans toward private doctors and hospitals.
Additional details
- “There’s actually an excitement about what’s going on,” said Collins, a former personal lawyer for Trump, in congressional testimony this spring.
- The behemoth agency, which traces its roots to the Civil War, is both the country’s largest healthcare system and one of its most effective.
- If Trump’s appointees couldn’t lay off employees, they would make work conditions so untenable that staffers would leave on their own.
- But nothing had been normal at East Orange since President Donald Trump returned to office last year and set his sights on the VA.
- It provides 9 million veterans what is essentially socialized medicine, often for free, under the cover of the American flag.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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