Santa Rosa Veterans Say They Won’t Be Fooled by the False Promise of VA Privatization

On April Fool’s Day, over a hundred veterans, former VA employees and local healthcare activists met at a Veterans Town Hall in the Veterans’ Memorial Building in Santa Rosa, California.  The meeting was called to alert veterans and the local community to the cost and consequences of “The Tragic Dismantling of the VA.”  A number of veterans groups, like Veterans for Peace, Veterans of Sonoma County and local community members who, for the past year, have spent every Friday rallying in front of the Santa Rosa Community Based Outpatient Clinic (CBOC), sponsored the event.

“Twenty -five people were just out there today in the rain,” Helen Effron, a retired VA Nurse Practitioner, who is a member of Veterans of Sonoma County told me this past Friday.   “We’re former VA employees, as well as veterans and their families and we come every week to inform Sonoma County veterans and the community at large about the actions Donald Trump and his VA Secretary Doug Collins are taking to dismantle the Veterans Health Administration (VHA ) and how this will impact Sonoma County and the entire country,

”Effron, along with former Santa Rosa VA CBOC Chief Medical Officer Ginger Schechter and Kym Valadez, who was the president of NFFE (National Federation of Federal Employees) Local One, is determine to make sure that veterans aren’t fooled by VA Secretary Doug Collins’ assurances that pushing more veterans into a taxpayer funded private sector healthcare network – The Veterans Community Care Program (VCCP — is providing them with more – and better — healthcare choices. The VCCP now outsources more than 40% of VHA care to  over 1.7 million private sector contractors who have little or no understanding of veterans’ complex health conditions.  This program is cannibalizing the VHA’s inhouse delivery of clinical care to the tune of over $30 billion in FY 2026.  As studies have shown, the VCCP delivers care that is of lower quality, and less timely, and  conveniently located than care delivered by the VHA, which is equal or superior to that provided by the private sector.

One of the panelists at the meeting, a VA psychologist who works in suicide prevention, vividly described what Secretary Collins’ policies have wrought.  Collins’ hiring freezes, staff cuts, failure to fill –and caps on — vacant positions are crippling the ability of VA staff to respond to a deluge of calls to the Veterans Crisis Line as well as the needs of new patients coming to the VHA because of the PACT Act.  This recently passed, but long overdue legislation, finally allows millions of veterans who have suffered from myriad toxic exposures during their military service to seek care from the VA.

“There are dramatic increases in workload, providers expected to see more patients and on the veteran side that means less provider availability,” the psychologist explained.  “Sometimes I wake up at three o’clock in the morning.  I’m staring at the ceiling.  I figure I can lay there or I can just go in now and try to catch up on my charting.”

Panelists and veterans in the audience challenged  Secretary Collins’s assurance that cuts to non -clinical staff, like clerks or housekeepers or dietary workers, isn’t affecting the delivery of clinical care.

As the psychologist explained, “My job, at its core, is to deal with folks who are in kinetic, rapid fire, very volatile and complicated situations and to connect them with care as quickly as humanly possible.  If the system is not firing on all cylinders, it’s orders magnitude more difficult to do that. So, when you say you’re going to protect clinicians but fire admin staff that’s like saying you’re going to keep the conductor but fire the orchestra.”

The vets in the audience understood these problems all too well.  As veteran patients stood up and gave witness to the impact VHA care has had on their lives, I felt like I was in a revival meeting.   Over and over again, they proclaimed, they feel that the VA is their best, indeed their first choice.

As Coast Guard veteran Dan Dewell wrote on the Veterans of Sonoma County Facebook page, “Most veterans who use the VA system think it’s great.  Many would literally not be alive without it.”

Steve Weigert, a combat wounded Marine veteran who served in the Vietnam War echoed Dewell’s comments.  “The VA saved my life both from my PTSD and from the cancers I’ve had from my Agent Orange exposure.  I still use the VA today both seeing a provider for mental health and the medical side.  I’m very appreciative of what the VA does for me.”

Fred Ptucha, the president of the local chapter of Veterans for Peace, also served in Vietnam. “I still suffer from moral injury from participating in a war I didn’t believe in,” he told me. ”The VA has therapists who really understand the problems veterans face.”

All these veterans said they were opposed to what they feel is a concerted effort to force them to seek private sector care. Many veterans in the audience were also members of large veterans’ service organizations like the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars.  They were angry that these large and powerful VSOs weren’t doing more to oppose Trump policies and VA privatization.

Perhaps the most heart wrenching testimonials came from older veterans, like those who’d served in Vietnam, and who said they had resisted seeking care at the VA for far too long.  One explained that he’d resisted going to the VA for help for decades.  Finally, after suffering for years, he found the care that has allowed him to cope with the enduring wounds of war.

It is critical, he and other organizers said, to save the VHA healthcare system so that it will be there to serve future cohorts of veterans.  How, these veterans wondered, can private sector providers who understand little or nothing about the veteran experience ever help them?  How can they heal without the expertise the VHA has accumulated over a century?  These are the questions Congress must address and answer.

“The point of this meeting and our rallies in front of the VA,’” says Ginger Schechter, “is to help veterans understand how their healthcare is being impacted and how dismantling the VA can hurt all Americans.  We want veterans to keep these issues not only at the forefront of their minds but of candidates’ minds in the upcoming election. When they meet with candidates, they need to ask them if they know, for example, that the VHA teaches future generations of healthcare professionals.  Without the VHA, doctor shortages will get even worse.

”The goal here, the organizers insist, is not to rant and rave about Trump, it’s to make sure pernicious policies are reversed and to assure that, if Democrats are elected this fall, they don’t return to the status quo ante, but instead fight to improve the VA and with it all of American healthcare.