“Get Pete Hegseth on the phone!”
It was in March 2018, and at that time the President of the country, Mr. Donald Trump, was meeting with the Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. David Shulkin, on health care reform. But it was Hegseth, now a Fox News personality, whose views Trump really liked.
Hegseth, now Trump’s nominee to serve as secretary of defense, has been an active and persistent advocate for veterans having unrestricted access to private health care, rather than going through the VA to keep their benefits. He also calls for policies that limit VA care and believes that veterans should be able to claim fewer government benefits.
“We want to have a full option where veterans can go wherever they want for care,” Hegseth told Trump on the phone as Shulkin listened, according to Shulkin’s 2019 memoir.
Trump’s choice to serve as the next VA secretary, Doug Collins, has also shown support for expanding veteran health care, which is seen as giving veterans greater choice over their doctors. If veterans “want to go back to their doctors, so be it,” he told Fox News last month.
For Shulkin, “a rare touch” from the administration of President Barack Obama to Trump, this was a “worst case scenario” for veteran health care, and one that he had repeatedly warned Hegseth about.
“Your electoral reform is costing billions a year, disrupting the system,” Shulkin recalls telling Hegseth in his memoir. “How can we pursue it in a rational way? Unfortunately, he didn’t want to deal with the budget and other day-to-day matters of course. He seemed to enjoy playing his voice on television.”
If confirmed, Hegseth and Collins will have the opportunity to push for a dramatic reform of military and veteran health care, which could significantly reduce the government’s health care for workers and veterans – many of which Hegseth says veterans should not be asking for at all.
Veterans groups “encourage veterans to apply for any government assistance they can get after they retire,” he told Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” in 2019. “For me, the ethos of service is, I served my country because. I love my country and I’m going to come home and start the next chapter of life If I have a chronic illness – mental, physical, or otherwise – let the government be there for me, but if not I don’t want to depend on that.”
CNN reached out to Hegseth and the Trump administration for comment on the matter.
‘A common swampy feedback loop’
The fight by small government supporters to protect VA health care is not new, especially since the VA has long been plagued by government problems, causing wait times and sometimes delays in veterans’ treatment.
Hegseth told the “Shawn Ryan Show” podcast last month that he’s not openly supporting the VA, but instead “letting dollars follow the pile” to their favorite doctor.
Critics, however, say that the “uncovered option” list is a trojan horse to cheat and eventually eliminate the VA system altogether, whose budget was more than 300 billion dollars in 2024.
Hegseth told Shawn Ryan that the VA “hates” discussions about other private options “because their budget could be cut.”
“It’s a normal response to water,” he said. He added that when he was being considered for VA secretary in 2016, he heard from a large number of veterans who supported his ideas.
But Amy McGrath, a retired Marine pilot challenged Sen. Mitch McConnell in his seat in Kentucky in 2020, confirmed in an interview with CNN that while the debate about the security of the government “has been going on for years,” nothing. it has been “a widespread cry from veterans to save the VA.”
“I’m not saying the VA is perfect, it’s not,” said McGrath, a Democrat. “But I don’t think there’s a huge clamor for it to be legalized.”
The head of the Biden administration told CNN that within the VA, there are a number of civil servants “who have dedicated their lives to the health and well-being of the veterans our country has sent to war many times.” These civil servants are now very concerned about the “continuity of health care and access to benefits for the soldiers they serve,” the official added.
As secretary of defense, Hegseth would oversee the Military Health System, which is separate from the Veterans Health Administration. But Hegseth is strongly opposed to government-provided health care, and has argued that health care benefits for both active duty members and veterans should be cut significantly so that the Pentagon can spend more on “war-fighting,” according to Wall Street. Journal op-ed he wrote in 2014.
“If this continues, the Department of Defense will eventually become a health care provider and the pension provider also happens to fight war,” he wrote.
McGrath also said that while he understands the idea of trying to reduce costs, there is no data “that shows me that privatization is going to reduce costs significantly.”
“Health care is expensive, no matter how you do it,” he said. “And I’m afraid, and I think a lot of people are afraid, you’re going to lose the quality of care, because now you’re going to exchange veteran care for a private, private sector that has an incentive to make money… health insurance makes money to deny care. Is that what we want?”
Restrict VA care
As CEO of the veterans organization, Concerned Veterans for America, a group supported by billionaire conservatives Charles and David Koch, Hegseth called for providing VA health care only to veterans with service-connected disabilities and needs.
The law would greatly limit the number of future veterans eligible for VA care at all. Hegseth’s criticism of the vast amount of government benefits available to veterans has sparked outrage from veterans groups.
Max Rose, an Army Reserve officer and Democratic former congressman who now serves as general counsel for the progressive organization VoteVets, called Hegseth’s comments “grossly disrespectful” to veterans, who are trusted “to go to war, to save the country, to defend.” our rights, and our way of life – and then we think that they will come home and become victims of health care?”
In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, Shulkin said some of Hegseth’s views were not outlandish — he agrees that veterans should have access to care, especially if wait times for VA appointments are long. But he also said that Hegseth, as an outsider with no experience at the VA or in health care, did not understand the “complexities” of the system he was trying to fix at all.
“At that point, I was telling him, ‘I’m down, I know the truth,'” he told CNN in an interview on Wednesday. “I see patients, veterans with PTSD. I have been a doctor all my life in the private sector. I know that my hospitals that I ran could not take care of these patients. I am not just giving [veterans] then say, ‘I’m lucky.’
As Shulkin’s memoir shows, Hegseth — and Concerned Veterans for America — exerted considerable influence over Trump on the issue. Trump considered hiring Hegseth as VA secretary in 2016, Hegseth told Ryan.
By the time Trump took office, Hegseth had already stepped down from the CVA amid reported charges of financial mismanagement, drunkenness and sexual harassment, all of which Hegseth denies. However, CVA “was always at the White House and showing up to meetings when I didn’t invite them,” Shulkin wrote in his memo. “Across the board, the White House staff made sure the CVA was given a strong voice.”
The progressive government watchdog American Oversight also documented the CVA’s influence over Trump on the issue in the early years of his administration.
‘That’s our job’
Kate Kuzminski, director of the military, veterans, and community program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), said that there is a discussion that can be done about moving more health services – especially these services that are not goods. directly related to military service – in the VA and outside of the VA. For example, an annual inspection, or regular access to protection.
But, he said, it raises more questions, especially about whether veterans in disadvantaged communities, such as those with low incomes, can still get help if the VA is no longer an option for them.
“There’s an opportunity for people who need to get help, whether it’s too late to get that or not able to get it at all … and we as a country have said philosophically, yes, that’s our job,” Kuzminski said.
When it comes to the military health system overseen by the secretary of defense, the Pentagon this year began to review its policy over the past decade to try to reduce the cost of health care by cutting staff in military health centers and giving care to private doctors. and hospitals.
Going to private care was making it difficult for service members to find doctors because of staff shortages in military facilities and the fact that TriCare, which allows soldiers and their families access to private doctors and clinics, was either not accepted by many providers or only allowed access to subpar facilities, the DoD inspector general report it was discovered last year.
“I can appreciate that it feels good to advocate for people to have more freedom and the ability to choose,” Shulkin said. “There is no doubt that that is an important part of health. But you have to have a system that you can send them to that knows how to deal with the exposure to the poison and the post-traumatic stress, and the injuries that were happening to our young men and women who were coming back after an IED explosion, and they needed that kind of thing. of prosthetic care is difficult to understand.”
Rose also expressed the same concern that veterans may not be able to get the type of care they need from a health care provider. The problems with the VA’s health services — he has examples that are, “irrefutable” — “are a reason to build on our existing system, not tear it down.”
“Being able to walk into a school and talk to someone who understands not only the experience of combat, but the experience of just being in the military — a private healthcare facility can’t replace that,” Rose said.
Kuzminski acknowledged that there is a case where the VA wins more than public health in medicine, but said there has been “a lot of progress” in the last decade on electronic health records, which would allow the military and public health providers to have more health. a picture of the health care needs of the veteran.
Shulkin said he will reserve judgment on Hegseth’s nomination until he sees him address servicemember and veteran care issues during his confirmation hearing. But he said he hopes Hegseth’s opinion has changed.
“I believe that any good leader should be able to know if their ideas need to change or should change,” he said, “and then be able to speak and say what their vision for leading the organization is.”
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