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Perry O’Brien of Camden is a U.S. Army veteran who served in Afghanistan. He is Senior Campaign’s director at Common Defense. Suzanne Gordon is a healthcare journalist and senior policy analyst at The Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute.
Over the past several months, veterans and their caregivers in Maine have protested the fact that Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins has curtailed VA research, canceled contracts that provide VA patients with critical services, and now plans to eliminate 30,000 VA staff.
According to Collins, none of these policies will stop 9 million VA-users (over 50,000 of whom live in Maine) from getting needed care. That’s because he believes they will have no trouble accessing care through the VA’s new Veterans Community Care Program (VCCP), which now pays over $30 billion a year to contract with 1.7 million private sector providers.
“VA is providing veterans with more health care choices,” Collins says, “ … making it even easier for veterans to get their health care when and where it’s most convenient for them.”
In Maine many veterans believe just the opposite: more private sector care means fewer choices and unacceptable delays.
A 50-state report recently released by The Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute, entitled “Veterans Healthcare Choice Myth or Reality?” confirmed their worst fears. In the state of Maine, the private sector will have a very hard time delivering the kind of services provided to some 56,000 veterans in Maine’s major VA medical center, 12 outpatient clinics, five Vet Centers, and nursing homes.
Every veteran who visits a VA medical center or clinic receives care not just from a primary care provider but from a team made up of mental health professionals, pharmacists, social workers, and dieticians. In Maine’s private sector, it’s increasingly hard to even find a primary care doctor who is accepting new patients, much less a team that offers wrap-around services.
Of Maine’s 16 counties, 13 have primary care provider shortages. By 2030, Maine will need 120 more primary care providers but the state doesn’t have enough primary residency slots to fill the gap.
Over 41% of veterans have mental health problems. If they are forced to rely on Maine’s private sector, they’ll join the nearly one-third of Maine residents who have mental health problems and have a hard time accessing care. That’s because, with the exception of the five counties in southwestern Maine, every other county has a mental health professional shortage. Given these shortages, it’s not surprising that drug overdose death rates in the state have increased more than four-fold in the last decade and a half, and that Maine’s suicide rate is higher than the national average.
When it comes to hospital care, Maine’s rural residents — and veterans — can’t count on getting it. Since 2015, three of Maine’s hospitals have closed and half have lost services, and half are at risk of closure with 21 percent at immediate risk of closure. In May, for example, Waterville’s Northern Light Inland Hospital closed its hospital and clinics. Plus, by one estimate, between 21 and 30% of the state’s rural hospitals stopped providing obstetric care.
In contrast, as numerous studies document, if the VA remains well funded and well staffed, the care it delivers is often more timely, accessible, and less costly than that provided by private sector providers. Plus, VA care is also of higher quality because most private sector doctors, nurses, and therapists simply lack the skill and specialized knowledge to deal with veterans’ complex health problems.
Maine’s congressional delegation needs to strongly oppose the Trump Administration’s continued costly and unnecessary outsourcing and defunding of critical VA functions. If this stealth VA privatization is not stopped, Maine veterans will likely find themselves in the same long lines and “medical deserts” as their friends, neighbors, and non-veteran relatives and the first choice of most veterans — the VA — will simply vanish.
