How Project 2025 Will Impact Veterans
By Patrick Cano, a Marine Veteran and works for the federal government in Illinois.
I’m a disabled Marine veteran, with a service- connected disability that gives me both access to free healthcare from the healthcare system run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Veterans Health Administration.
I have earned these benefits after serving my country in the Marines for eight years from 1995 -2004, when, among other things, I was sent to Panama and Ecuador in an effort to stem the flow of narcotics into the U.S.
As a result of my service, I suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), have significant hearing loss, and have had surgery on my right knee and my right shoulder. Over the past twenty years, I have received excellent care from the only people who know how to take care of my military related health conditions – the VHA.
As a federal employee, who works as I have also benefited from the fact that veterans receive preferential hiring for federal jobs. A third of the employees who work in the VHA(about 140,000) are veterans and our government hires veterans at three times the rate of the private sector, with disabled veterans seven times more likely to be hired.
But Presidential candidate Donald Trump and his vice President pick J.D. Vance and their allies at the Heritage Foundation want to change all that. The Heritage Foundations, has provided these candidates with a detailed plan, called Project 2025, on how to privatize the VA and dramatically cut federal employment. Project 2025’s plans, if implemented, would send millions of veterans to private sector doctors and hospitals, who studies document, don’t know much about our complex military related conditions. It also proposes firing thousands of federal employees who are veterans like myself.
Let me tell you how this would impact me personally.
The thing that means the most to me about the VA is its continuity of care. If I go into the VA with a problem with my shoulder, and the doctor notices I am a bit iffy, she can send me over to see a counselor. If the counselor learns that I’ve got a bad tooth, he can say go down and see the dentist. When I walk out of the VA, there’s a plan to fix my shoulder; I’ve gotten some much needed counseling, and my tooth is okay, all with no bills, no worry, and no hassle. The attitude at the VA is ‘what can I do to help you?’
At the VA they also understand how to manage my medical problems and my PTSD, which believe me, is not easy. When I go outside of the VA that’s not always the case. Once when I was in a private hospital for surgery, I woke up from the anesthesia and was really angry (my wife calls it “Marining out”). I don’t even remember what I was saying. What I do remember to this day, is that instead of understanding what was going on with me, the nurses seemed downright hostile. In fact, they said they if I continued to behave the way I didn’t know I was behaving they were going to call the police. That would not be good. As a federal employee, if I were arrested, I could have lost my job.
I was lucky this time. The doctor who came in to see me was a Vietnam veteran. He said, ‘hold on guys, he’s a veteran, he’s served overseas, I know how to handle this.’ They sedated me, put me to sleep and I rested well. This would never have happened at the VA. Which is why I prefer the VA and am willing to take the two- hour drive from the South suburbs to Jesse Brown VA hospital because I just get better care at there.
But project 2025 will end all this. The architects of Project 2025 would eliminate benefits for things like PTSD because they believe that veterans who are suffering from mental health conditions are just pretending to be disabled. They insist that we veterans can get good care in the private sector, even though studies document that VA care is better and even cheaper. Their plan, if implemented, would kick tens of thousands of veterans out of good, well-paying jobs that allow us to continue serving the nation. This is no way to fulfill the nation’s sacred promise to its veterans.