Hegseth dresses up the MAGA giveaway-to-the-rich scheme as a benefit to veterans. “We want to have full choice where veterans can go wherever they want for care,” Hegseth reportedly told Donald Trump and then-VA head Dr. David Shulkin during Trump’s first term in office, as per CNN. But it’s really a plan that would destroy the current system, not improve it, and make things worse for vets.
More from CNN:
“Your version of choice would cost billions more per year, bankrupting the system,” Shulkin recalls telling Hegseth in his memoir. “How can we responsibly pursue this? Unfortunately, he didn’t want to engage at the level of budget and other aspects of day-to-day reality. He seemed to prefer his sound bites on television.”
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“At the time, I was telling him, ‘I’m here on the ground, I know the reality,’” [Shulkin] told CNN in an interview on Wednesday. “I see the patients, the veterans with PTSD. I’ve been a doctor my whole life in the private sector. I know my hospitals that I ran didn’t have the capability to care for these patients. I’m not just going to give [veterans] a voucher and say, ‘Good luck.’”
If Hegseth becomes the secretary of the Defense Department, he would oversee the Military Health System, which treats active duty servicemembers. He wants to cut those services significantly as well as those to vets, CNN noted, so that the Pentagon has more money for “war-fighting capability.”
It’s not hard to understand who would benefit from massive privatization of veterans’ services – the private sector. People are already so angry at private health insurance that they’ve been championing the murderer of the United Healthcare CEO. How do you think they’ll feel when veterans’ claims are delayed and denied, too?
Here’s a taste of what Hegseth wants more of, via CNN:
When it comes to the military health system that the defense secretary directly oversees, the Pentagon this year began to re-evaluate its policy over the last decade of trying to reduce health care costs by cutting staff at military health facilities and outsourcing care to private doctors and hospitals.
That move toward privatized care was making it harder for servicemembers to access doctors because of staffing shortages at military facilities and the fact that TriCare, which allows troops and their families to access private doctors and clinics, was either not being accepted by many private providers or only allowed access to subpar facilities, a DoD inspector general report found last year.
As the above video shows, Fox News will almost certainly help propagandize for privatization, too.
So when Hegseth, Fox, Project 2025 and the never-having-served billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy talk about cutting services to troops and vets as “choice” or “efficiency,” or whatever lipstick they put on the pig, don’t forget it’s a big gift to the already very wealthy. The rest of us will be the ones who pay.