The D-Day anniversary on June 6 is a pretty irresistible date for scheduling a protest related to veterans’ benefits. Eighty-one years ago, American soldiers and their allies stormed ashore in Normandy, establishing a critical beachhead in the military campaign to defeat Adolf Hitler and Nazism.
In World War II’s aftermath, hundreds of thousands of injured veterans were treated back home in a nationwide network of hospitals run by the federal government. Since then, the Veterans Affairs (VA) health care system has greatly expanded, and now through the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) provides high-quality care to nine million veterans. The majority of those veterans want to see the VHA improved and even expanded.
However, during the first Trump administration, the White House and a bipartisan coalition in Congress decided that veterans’ health care delivery needed to shift to the private sector. After passage of the VA MISSION Act of 2018, Trump’s second VA secretary, Robert Wilkie — a right-wing Southern Republican — claimed that partial VHA privatization would produce “more patient satisfaction and predictability, more efficiency for our clinicians, and better value for taxpayers.”
Using D-Day as a protest peg six years ago, a few veterans and their caregivers challenged this view. Members of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), National Nurses United (NNU), and Veterans for Peace (VFP) staged a “National Day to Save the VA” from privatization. That resulted in modest rallies, press conferences, or informational picketing in only a dozen locations, because the grassroots effort drew little or no support from major veterans’ organizations, the national AFL-CIO, or big-name politicians. But…
Auteur: Steve Early
