By Bruce Carruthers, Vietnam Veteran and VHPI Steering Committee Member In the recent book These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs – and Wrecks – America, authors Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner detail how corporate control of an increasingly large swath of the U.S.

By Russell B. Lemle, PhD, Senior Policy Analyst Last week, ProPublica, published an article purporting to expose “How the VA Fails Veterans on Mental Health.” In fact, the story ignored crucial context, omitted larger realities, and used isolated anecdotes to unfairly assail the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

By Russell Lemle, originally on Military.com In the VA’s recently released National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report, which covered 2020 to 2021, the suicide rate among women veterans jumped 24.1 percent — far greater than the 6.3 percent increase among male veterans.

By Russell Lemle and Suzanne Gordon, originally in Washington Monthly In 2014, Congress passed the Veterans Access, Choice, and Accountability Act, which set up a temporary program that outsourced veterans’ care from the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) to private sector providers.

By Russell Lemle, originally in Task & Purpose Last week, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a meticulous study that showed veterans have a higher likelihood of dying if they choose care in the community rather than Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals.

By Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early, originally in Jacobin Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the often-hidden wound of war. Post-9/11 wars added hundreds of thousands of former service members to the patient rolls of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) — the nation’s largest public health care system — to get treatment for anger and depression, substance abuse, suicidal ideation, and past exposure to military sexual trauma.

A recent article in The New York Times provides a poignant example of the problems faced by veterans with Other than Honorable (OTH) discharges. Hundreds of thousands of service members who have mental or physical problems acquired or exacerbated by military service are given such discharges as punishment. Veterans who receive a bad paper discharge are not only denied access to VA healthcare, but are also ineligible for any other benefits, including veteran preference when applying for a job.

On November 16th, the VA released its annual National Veteran Suicide Prevention Report, analyzing data and factors associated with US veterans who died by suicide in 2021.

By Paul Sullivan In 2011, a mother in distress phoned me about her son who had just returned from the war in Iraq.

By Paul Sullivan Thanks to bipartisan work in Congress and the President’s signature in August 2022, the PACT Act became law. Since then, a tide of more than a million disability claims have been submitted by veterans to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

Today, the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI) published a new report focused on how VA privatization threatens America’s national security. The paper is written by Ryan Leone, a medical student at Columbia University who is also a U.S. Army officer and former Presidential Management Fellow at the Department of Defense’s Defense Health Agency.

By Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early in The American Prospect The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has been suffering from continuing staffing shortages at the nation’s largest public health care system, which has hampered the ability to directly care for veterans.

By Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early in Beyond Chron The national wave of worker unrest over hospital conditions that create job stress, burn-out, and short staffing reached the corner of Clement and 42ndStreets in the outer Richmond last Wednesday, Oct. 18. Nearly 100 RNs and other staffers from the San Francisco VA Medical Center (SFVAMC) spent their breaks or lunch hour on an informational picket-line, organized by Local 1 of the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE), which represents

Today, the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI) published a new report sounding the alarm over a number of misguided Congressional proposals that promise to increase healthcare access for veterans in rural areas. Entitled “The Problem of Rural Veterans Healthcare and How to Solve it,” the VHPI report warns that further privatization of the healthcare system run by the Department of Veterans of Affairs (VA) will weaken healthcare access for the 2.7 VA patients who live in rural areas.

By Russell B. Lemle, PhD, VHPI Policy Director VHPI recently criticized the VA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) for providing far too little oversight of the Community Care Network (CCN), a growing cadre of private providers who now deliver a third of VA’s health care. One step in the right direction is a new OIG report regarding CCN providers who prescribe controlled substances for veterans.

By Russell Lemle and Jasper Craven in Task & Purpose The realm of veterans health care policymaking has, for a decade, been dominated by a dangerous libertarian fallacy, namely that greater personal choice and less government involvement are unequivocally advantageous. Allowing more options, lawmakers and advocates contend, benefits every veteran. It’s even framed as a patriotic “defense of freedom.” ,

By Bruce Carruthers The VA’s Office of the Inspector General recently released its annual staffing shortage report for Veterans Health Administration (VHA) facilities. It shows an alarming surge of “severe” staffing shortages over the last two years. (A severe shortage, broadly defined, occurs when vacancies in a particular vocation are consistently difficult to fill) Between 2021 and 2022, severe staffing shortages increased by 21.8 percent; last year they increased by 18.9 percent…