{"id":402,"date":"2026-07-13T09:08:47","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T09:08:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/frontierhousingreport.com\/?p=402"},"modified":"2026-07-13T09:08:47","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T09:08:47","slug":"which-veterans-on-the-ballot-defend-va-health-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/frontierhousingreport.com\/?p=402","title":{"rendered":"Which Veterans on the Ballot Defend VA Health Care?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It\u2019s become a perennial trend: Democratic candidates who served in the military are wooing voters by presenting themselves as tougher, more effective public servants. Across the country, anti-MAGA \u201cservice candidates\u201d have questioned billions in new Pentagon spending on another Middle East war, amid Donald Trump\u2019s assault on domestic social programs, immigrants and labor, civil liberties and voting rights, and environmental protection.<\/p>\n

Read more Super PAC Attacks Progressive Will Lawrence Over His $11,000 401(k)<\/a><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, too few of these service candidates have been equally vocal about saving the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) health care system from a failed bipartisan experiment with privatization that began under the Obama administration. During Trump\u2019s second term, not only is public provision of health care for nine million former service members at risk, but so are services the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) provides all Americans by future health care professionals and conducting critical . Also at risk are good union jobs for 100,000 veterans (and 300,000 others) employed by the VA.<\/p>\n

More from Suzanne Gordon<\/em> | Steve Early<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Where politicians stand on the issue often reflects their own class background, rank in the military, and material circumstances after they return to civilian life. Their positions also reflect their views about broader health care reform, including proposals like Medicare for All or the increasing corporatization of the non-VA system.<\/p>\n

Vets from working-class backgrounds who have held blue-collar jobs depend on veterans health care and benefits far more than former members of the officer class. The latter include Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), who is running for Senate this year against incumbent Democrat Ed Markey. Both Hegseth and Moulton graduated from Ivy League schools and then did postgraduate work at Harvard, before getting hired as a broker on Wall Street or corporate manager, respectively.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hardly surprising that neither appreciates the importance of VA care to lower-income vets; instead, both men believe that \u201cgovernment health care\u201d has failed and favor its privatization.<\/p>\n

Undermined by Outsourcing<\/strong><\/h3>\n

As reported for years by the Prospect<\/em>, direct care for veterans has been seriously undermined by outsourcing to the private health care industry. Most Democrats then in Congress helped President Trump pass the VA MISSION Act of 2018, one of his biggest first-term legislative victories, which accelerated this disastrous shift from in-house to private-sector care via the Veterans Community Care Program (VCCP).<\/p>\n

Since then, tens of billions of dollars that should have been spent on the VA\u2019s own high-quality, specialized treatment was instead diverted to over 1.7 million private doctors and hospitals. This coming year, nearly one-third of all VA spending on health care will be diverted to Medicare-style reimbursement of outside vendors, who have little training and experience caring for veterans.<\/p>\n

As a new RAND study found, vets referred outside the VA had only marginally improved access, while the cost of their care increased. In Massachusetts, The Boston<\/em> Globe<\/em> found that Bay State VA facilities are suffering from staff cuts, longer wait times, and fragmentation of patient care that was much better coordinated when delivered in-house. These problems have been documented in myriad nationwide studies, including a recent survey conducted by the nonprofit VetVoice Foundation.<\/p>\n

Military Sexual Trauma<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In contrast to many service member candidates and elected officials, House candidate JoAnna Mendoza\u2019s defense of the VA is personal, powerful, and reflects her poverty-stricken past as the daughter of immigrant cotton-pickers in Arizona. She is almost a poster child for the kind of woman veteran who relies on VA care, which one study defines as disproportionately women who are \u201csingle, younger, and from a racial-ethnic minority group.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mendoza is running to replace Rep. Juan Ciscomani, a pro-Trump Republican, in Arizona\u2019s Sixth Congressional District. She is playing up a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 that includes combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and rare service as a female drill instructor in the Marines.<\/p>\n

As she told The New York <\/em>Times<\/em> last month, she was sexually assaulted twice by fellow Marines (only one of whom was punished) and left the military with a serious drinking problem. (One in three women seen in VA health facilities have experienced military sexual trauma.) She\u2019s sober now and \u201ca queer single mother,\u201d who gets health care from the Tucson VA Medical Center. A former Medicaid recipient, she \u201copposes privatizing Medicare\u201d because it is leading to \u201chigher prices and worse care for patients.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her VA-related positions are exceptionally detailed and reflect firsthand experience with a range of services, like care for military sexual trauma (MST), which as the Prospect<\/em> has previously reported, would be impossible to access in the private sector. Mendoza \u201cwill work to expand VA specialty care in rural communities, increase access through telehealth and mobile services, and fix transportation barriers by improving eligibility and reimbursement rates,\u201d according to her website. She has also supported modernizing VA electronic health records with an eye toward improving coordinated care, and she wants to protect against so-called \u201cclaim sharks\u201d who pose as advisers to veterans seeking benefits and then steal the funds.<\/p>\n

A Petition to Secretary Collins<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In North Carolina, former Army paratrooper Richard Ojeda won a Democratic primary in that state\u2019s deep-red Ninth Congressional District. He is now waging an uphill fight against Richard Hudson, a well-connected House Republican. The descendant of union coal miners who emigrated from Mexico to West Virginia, Ojeda wants \u201cto go to Congress and raise hell for the working class \u2026 the people who punch a clock, serve this country, raise families, and still feel abandoned by the political establishment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Earlier in his campaign, Ojeda took an unusual step in electoral politics, by organizing his own future constituents to take grassroots action to defend VA care against DOGE-driven staffing shortages. He collected 90,000 signatures on a petition protesting the Trump administration\u2019s attacks on VA patients and their unionized caregivers. Then, he and his supporters personally delivered the petition to agency officials in Washington.<\/p>\n

The letter demanded that VA Secretary Doug Collins reject an \u201cunlawful executive order\u201d issued by Trump that \u201crips out long-standing civil rights protections and opens the door to denying VA care based on marital status, sexual orientation, religion, or even voting for a Democrat.\u201d<\/p>\n

During his primary, Ojeda found encouraging signs that former Trump supporters are having second thoughts. \u201cThey\u2019re looking around at the wreckage so far, the ICE kidnappings, the censorship, and the economic pain,\u201d he said. More people, he believes, \u201care realizing that they were pawns in the oldest con in the book\u2014blame immigrants, blame workers, blame anyone who doesn\u2019t look or pray or live the way you do.\u201d<\/p>\n

As he told us for our new book, Courage or Complicity?<\/em>, \u201cWe have to talk to people who were misled by Trump and give them something to believe in other than a cult of personality. If you give people something worth fighting for, they will fight for each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stop the Exploitation<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Dan Osborn became a public figure in Nebraska by leading a successful 11-week strike by 500 fellow workers at a Kellogg\u2019s cereal factory in Omaha. Before working in that plant for 18 years and becoming local union president, he dropped out of college and joined the military. In 2026, the Navy veteran and National Guard member is making his second highly competitive bid for the U.S. Senate as a labor-backed independent.<\/p>\n

Osborn\u2019s blue-collar agenda highlights the need for labor law reform, minimum-wage increases, paid family leave, stronger rail safety enforcement, and consumer protection measures. He also makes the singular bold-faced demand: \u201cStop Privatization of the VA!<\/strong>\u201d <\/strong>He goes on to explain, as few other candidates have ever done, who is harmed and who is helped by outsourcing:<\/p>\n

Read more Organized Money: Curbing America\u2019s Gambling Problem<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cPrivatization was sold as a solution for rural veterans who live far from VA facilities,\u201d Osborn\u2019s campaign states. \u201cThe reality is that veterans in private systems face longer wait times, less coordinated care, and providers who are not trained in the unique health needs of those who served.\u201d He highlights how insurance companies have lobbied for privatization, and how private-sector care isn\u2019t specialized in the particular physical and mental challenges produced by military service.<\/p>\n

Privatization \u201cis not support for our veterans,\u201d Osborn\u2019s campaign wrote. \u201cThat is exploitation of them \u2026 The system works when we invest in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Osborn is the rare politician with uncertain health coverage of his own. Even with good union-negotiated medical benefits as a steamfitter, his individual and family coverage ended after he left work to campaign full-time. Unlike Mendoza and Ojeda, he never sought a disability rating from the VA based on a service-related condition, which would have allowed him to use its hospitals and clinics in Nebraska.<\/p>\n

Now, with help from a local veterans service organization, he is trying to become VA-eligible. He told the Prospect<\/em> that he is \u201cvery grateful for the existence of the VA, and the workers who are meeting the needs of veterans in our communities. The men and women who have signed on the dotted line to serve our country deserve every benefit they receive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Doubling Down on VA Criticism<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Seth Moulton burnished his r\u00e9sum\u00e9 as a political rebel when he tried to oust Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker eight years ago. At the time, three past legislative directors for the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and Disabled American Veterans publicly defended Pelosi\u2019s record as a reliable champion of the VA and related causes.<\/p>\n

At the same time, he was helping Donald Trump greatly expand privatization with the VA MISSION Act of 2018.<\/p>\n

During his four-month vanity campaign for president in 2020, Moulton touted past work with Republicans on passage of the Faster Care for Veterans Act. Signed into law by President Obama, this bill directed the VA to experiment with an online self-scheduling app for its patients\u2014an innovation which, according to Moulton, allowed them to make doctor appointments \u201cfrom their smart phones or computers with the click of a button.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, as Rick Weidman pointed out when he was legislative director of Vietnam Veterans of America: \u201cScheduling apps just mean that one veteran gets ahead of someone else in line.\u201d The real challenge, then and now, is properly funding and staffing VA hospitals and clinics so they have enough caregivers to assist all the new patients coming through the door.<\/p>\n

While VA vacancies have become even more of a problem during the current Trump administration, Moulton has made some populist head feints that conflate valid criticism of corporate health care with his usual VA-bashing. Responding to a private equity\u2013backed hospital failure in Massachusetts, he said in a fundraising text a few months ago: \u201cI\u2019ve seen government healthcare fail at the VA, and I\u2019ve watched private equity destroy our hospitals. That\u2019s why I\u2019ll fight for a public option that actually works.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sadly, Moulton seems unconcerned about the increasing influence of private equity and other corporate health care companies on the care of veterans outsourced to the private sector through the MISSION Act.<\/p>\n

To better understand what Moulton\u2019s proposal for a supposedly more workable \u201cpublic option\u201d for veterans might look like\u2014and how it might differ from the VA\u2019s existing nationwide public health care system\u2014the Prospect<\/em> contacted Moulton\u2019s campaign, by email and phone. We also sought further information about his own personal experience as a VA patient, which in a Boston Globe<\/em> interview more than a decade ago, he claimed was bad. No one, including his press secretary, ever responded.<\/p>\n

Turning to Moulton\u2019s campaign website, we learned that his alternative to \u201cone-size-fits-all government healthcare\u201d for former service members is a \u201chealth care plan that competes directly with private insurers and lowers premiums for everyone.\u201d It will, of course, \u201crecruit the best doctors and managers to run it, and learn from all the VA\u2019s mistakes.\u201d Nowhere to be found is any mention of the VA\u2019s many in serving the kind of men and women Moulton led while in Iraq. Many of these Marines now suffer from traumatic brain injuries, PTSD, MST, and chronic pain, and are at high risk for suicide.<\/p>\n

Champions or Privatizers?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

VoteVets, the leading Democratic Party\u2013aligned campaign organization for vets running for office, has already poured more than $12 million into 2026 races. Moulton and Mendoza are among its endorsed candidates; Ojeda and Osborn, who has twice spurned the Democratic Party label, are not.<\/p>\n

However, VoteVets seems to ignore the fact that Moulton has been such a poor soldier in the \u201cfight against ongoing attempts to privatize our Department of Veterans\u2019 Affairs health care,\u201d one of its own stated policy priorities. To be fair, others in Congress who joined Moulton in voting for the VA MISSION Act of 2018\u2014which supercharged privatization during the Trump-Biden-Trump administrations\u2014didn\u2019t lose VoteVets support either, including Sens. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Jack Reed (D-RI), and Gary Peters (D-MI), who is not running for re-election this year.<\/p>\n

With Honor Action, another veteran group, recently unveiled \u201cnew data showing a wave of military veterans stepping forward to serve in Congress: 752 veterans across all 50 states have run or are running for federal office this cycle, the highest number With Honor Action has tracked since it began monitoring veteran candidates in 2018.\u201d<\/p>\n

If elected\u2014or re-elected\u2014how many of the corporate Democrats and MAGA Republicans on that list of 752 will be real champions of other vets who depend on the VA? Based on the track record of those already serving on Capitol Hill and currently supporting, rather than opposing, VA privatization, the answer is: not many. Electing more Seth Moultons or sending him to the Senate will definitely not help the overwhelming majority of vets who value the VA and hope it will survive the Trump II era.<\/p>\n

Suzanne Gordon, co-founder of the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute, and Steve Early are co-authors of a new book called <\/em>Courage or Complicity? How Veterans Are Responding to the Assault on Democracy, from PM Press. It explores the role of military vets in labor, politics, anti-war activity, and anti-Trump resistance. They can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more Notes for Next Time<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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