Veterans groups and presidential candidates continue to spar over how to reform the Department of Veterans Affairs, most recently over Donald Trump's proposal to allow veterans to obtain government-funded health care at private providers.
Veterans who live more than 40 miles away from a VA facility or have been on a waiting list for a medical procedure for a certain period of time are already eligible to receive care at a private hospital or clinic. Trump's plan proposes allowing all veterans to seek care at any provider that accepts Medicare patients.
In contrast to many of his other ideas (making Mexico pay for a border wall, banning Muslim immigration, to name a couple), Trump's VA proposal is embraced in conservative policy circles. A Congressional commission tasked with developing a reform plan for the VA recently included a similar recommendation in a report.
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Of course, Trump advances those ideas with characteristic bombast, supported by dubious claims. He has said, for instance, that "illegal immigrants are taken much better care of in this country than our veterans."
Therefore, in addition to the expansion of private providers available to veterans, Trump said he will establish a hotline to the White House for veteran complaints about care. Problems that can't be addressed by staff, he said, would be addressed by the commander-in-chief himself.
Plenty of other veterans advocates, as well as groups on the left of the political spectrum, are vehemently opposed to what they say amounts to a full-scale privatization of the VA.
Despite some of the troubles the embattled agency has encountered in recent years, the care that veterans receive at VA facilities is generally superior to what they would receive elsewhere, they contend, and shifting patients to private providers will ultimately lead to the closure of VA facilities and the dismantlement of the enormous network of doctors who focus entirely on treating veterans.
The Trump proposal would "would gut the VA of the resources needed to provide high-quality, coordinated care," Bishop Garrison, an adviser to Hillary Clinton, told the Associated Press.
The American Federation of Government Employees, a union that represents many VA workers, denounced the proposal in even harsher terms.
"The VA system provides the best possible health care to veterans at the lowest possible cost. Veterans know this and that's why they overwhelmingly want to keep the VA health care they have," AFGE President David Cox said in a statement. "Trump's claims that privatization would improve care and cut costs are dead wrong. He is writing a blank check to huge hospital corporations to profit off the suffering of veterans."
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