This is a 'Code Red Alert' to APWU Veterans

The APWU launched our “Hands Off Our Veterans’ Healthcare and Disability Benefits” initiative in January 2024. Now, with the re-election of Donald Trump as President, 2025 could spell the end of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (VA) healthcare.

In the last Home Front article, we warned veterans about “Project 2025” and how a second Trump term would destroy the VA, and VA healthcare benefits. Unfortunately for our APWU veteran family, Trump won, and his Project 2025 plan to destroy VA healthcare could begin the minute he enters the White House.

So, what can we do to stop this attack that would totally privatize VA healthcare and leave millions of veterans without access to medical and mental healthcare services? Well, we could start by fighting back against this attack to cut or destroy the VA healthcare benefits for 22 million living veterans. Fighting back means thanking President Biden for signing the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act into law, and asking VA Secretary Denis McDonough to accelerate the implementation process that began over two years ago.

In a Letter to All Veterans, Dated Oct. 29, 2024, President Biden Stated the Following:

“As a nation we have many obligations, but only one truly sacred obligation: to train and equip those we send into harm’s way, and care for them and their families when they return home, and when they don’t. Our veterans and military families represent the best of America. We owe them. We owe you. May God bless the United States of America, and may God protect our troops. Signed Joe Biden.”

Fighting back means protecting PACT Act laws and protesting any attempt to restrict, reduce, or eliminate them. If President-elect Trump implements even a portion of the Project 2025 recommendations, the VA healthcare system could collapse entirely. By privatizing more government programs, the VA will foolishly and expensively outsource the healthcare and benefits to for-profit companies with little experience dealing with veterans, with a clear incentive to enhance their bottom line.

By cutting back on disability compensation, countless veterans will lose their jobs and homes, plunging many into poverty and causing them to experience more mental health problems. VA disability claims, which determine the severity and rating of a veteran’s disability, will be turned over to private, for-profit healthcare providers, thus overhauling and reducing compensation percentage rates and payment amounts for the veteran’s disability.

Fighting back means protesting Project 2025’s plan to reduce or eliminate the VA Mental and Medical benefits that veterans with service-connected conditions receive. Currently, once veterans prove they have a service-related condition, they can receive healthcare through the VA for that condition along with their non-service-connected conditions. Project 2025’s plan would potentially exclude a long list of supplementary VA healthcare services not directly related to the veteran’s time in active duty, that developed after leaving the military. A prime example of this would be living Vietnam War-era veterans, who until the PACT Act, had been denied military service-connected claims for cancer or diabetes for over 50 years.

The VA was established in 1930 with 54 Hospitals. In 1946, after another major war, it expanded to include healthcare benefits, establishing the current system, fully staffed with VA Federal Government workers. Today it has 1,600 healthcare facilities, including 144 medical centers and 1,232 outpatient clinics. The resources, need, and intent for VA healthcare facilities was to provide veterans with high quality healthcare and benefits, and all that was required to receive same-day basic healthcare was an honorable DD-214.

So, this is a Code Red Alert to our entire APWU veterans’ family. It’s time to wake up and fight for the VA healthcare benefits that all veterans deserve before Project 2025 takes them all away.

The Struggle Continues! ■