This story was published by the Valley News on March 29, 2018.
WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday said the firing of Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin a day earlier was part of a larger effort to privatize the VA — a move the independent senator from Vermont vehemently opposes.
Sanders said President Donald Trump’s termination of Shulkin, who first joined the VA in 2015 as undersecretary of Veterans Affairs for health and had faced questions about travel expenses in Europe, was primarily motivated by politics.
“I myself think that the firing of Shulkin has everything to do with the administration’s desire to privatize the VA, and I think that that is a disastrous idea,” Sanders said during a news conference on Thursday outside the White River Junction VA Medical Center, which he was visiting for Vietnam Veterans Day.
“The function of the Veterans Administration should be to provide the highest-quality care we can for men and women who put their lives on the line to defend us, not be a system in which private sectors can make huge amounts of profits off of our veterans and the taxpayers,” he added.
In a New York Times op-ed published after he was fired on Wednesday, Shulkin said “advocates within the administration” for privatization had pushed him out.
“They saw me as an obstacle to privatization who had to be removed,” wrote Shulkin, a former hospital administrator. “That is because I am convinced that privatization is a political issue aimed at rewarding select people and companies with profits, even if it undermines care for veterans.”
The president says he plans to replace Shulkin with his White House physician, Dr. Ronny Jackson, a rear admiral in the Navy.
Jackson has little administrative experience relevant to the task of running the VA, with a roughly $200 billion annual budget and more than 360,000 employees. He announced the results of the president’s first physical, along with a cognitive screening, in January, declaring Trump in “excellent health.”
“I don’t know Dr. Jackson, so I’m not going to comment on him at all,” Sanders said. “But I do find it strange that a nominee — that the president is nominating somebody who has zero experience within the Veterans Administration to take over one of the largest government agencies in this country.
“And I hope very much that we do not move toward a government where the only major criteria is loyalty to the president rather than expertise in the agencies that people are heading up. That concerns me.”
Trump in August signed an extension of the Veterans Choice program, an initiative that allows veterans to use federal funds on doctors at health care providers outside the VA system and was created in 2014 in response to a scandal over long wait times and falsified documents. Sanders, who was then chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, helped push the legislation through Congress as part of a larger reform at the VA.
A proposed expansion of the program has so far failed to gain headway in Congress.
Sanders also rejected the idea that Shulkin’s firing may have related to a VA inspector general’s report that sharply criticized the secretary for spending too much time sightseeing during a 2017 trip to Britain and Denmark, as well as for accepting Wimbledon tickets as a gift.
“You got a $200 billion budget, and they’re arguing about how he spent or didn’t spend $3,000?” Sanders said. “No — the issue is the $200 billion budget and the future of the VA. And those, by the way, those charges also don’t sometimes happen by accident.”
The report said it found “serious derelictions” on Shulkin’s part and pegged the cost of the trip at $122,000. In his op-ed, Shulkin said he had been “falsely accused of things by people who wanted me out of the way” and alluded to “politically based attacks on me and my family’s character.”
Shulkin cited recent reforms he helped make to the VA, which included an extension of the GI Bill for post-9/11 veterans and a bill to speed up disability appeals, as well as his unanimous confirmation vote in the Senate last year.
Shulkin joined the federal government relatively recently, having served for decades as a top administrator at such hospitals as Beth Israel Medical Center, in New York City and the University of Pennsylvania Health System.
Area veterans attending Thursday’s events with Sanders said they were largely satisfied with the White River Junction VA’s services, but said they had heard worse stories elsewhere.
“I’m very, very happy with the care I get here,” said Eric Hennessy, an Army Ranger vet from Perkinsville whose Vietnam photos and letters were featured in a display at the VA.
But his former comrades in arms, who now are scattered over the country, have had a much different experience, he said. “They’re struggling out there.”
Tim Cole and Dave Keough, U.S. Army veterans from New Hampshire, said they’d had very different experiences with the VA.
Cole, of Orford, said he had gone from being “1A” in 1966 — meaning a high-priority pick for the draft — to “8G” in today’s VA care priority system, which means his eligibility for services at the VA are far more limited because of his family’s income.
When he has a medical issue, he goes to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, not the veterans hospital. “You can’t get a Band-Aid here,” Cole said.
Keough, who lives in Gilford, N.H., said he had received satisfactory care at numerous VA facilities, not only here but in Manchester; Topeka, Kan.; Boston; and St. Petersburg, Fla.
Citing the record of private prisons, Keough said he would not like to see the VA go the same way.
“No, that would be bad,” he said. “Just look at the jail system. Look at how that went.”
Later on Thursday, Sanders, who is expected to seek a third term in the U.S. Senate in November, also visited the Bugbee Senior Center and the White River Junction Vet Center.
