Hegseth will grace MAGA’s wealthy giveaway to benefit veterans. According to CNN, during President Trump’s first term, Hegseth said, “We want our veterans to have full choice to go where they want to go for care,” as President Donald Trump and then-Secretary of Veterans Affairs He told Dr. David Shulkin. But in reality, it is a plan that will destroy the current system rather than improve it, making things even worse for veterans.
More from CNN:
“The version you chose would cost billions of dollars a year and bankrupt the system,” Shulkin recalled telling Hegseth in his memoir. “How can we pursue this responsibly? Unfortunately, he didn’t want to be involved in budget levels or other aspects of day-to-day reality. He prefers soundbites on TV. It was like that.”
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“I told him at the time, ‘I’ve been here and I know the reality,'” Shulkin said in an interview with CNN on Wednesday. “I see patients and veterans with PTSD. I’ve been a physician in the private sector all my life, and the hospitals I ran didn’t have the capacity to care for these patients. I’m not going to give[veterans]a voucher and say, ‘Good luck.’
If Mr. Hegseth becomes Pentagon secretary, he would oversee the military health care system that treats active-duty military personnel. CNN reported that he wants to make significant cuts to these services, as well as services to veterans, to free up more funding for the Pentagon for “warfighting capabilities.”
It’s not hard to see who would benefit from large-scale privatization of veterans services: the private sector. People are already so angry about private health insurance that they are coming to the defense of the person responsible for the murder of the United Healthcare CEO. How do you think veterans would feel if their claims were also deferred and denied?
Here’s some of what Hegseth wants more of, via CNN.
As for the military health care system, which is directly overseen by the Secretary of Defense, the Pentagon this year reevaluated its policies over the past decade that have sought to reduce health care costs by reducing staffing at military medical facilities and outsourcing care to civilian physicians. I started. And the hospital.
The move toward privatizing health care has resulted in staffing shortages at military facilities and the lack of acceptance by many civilian health care providers of Tricare, which gives service members and their families access to civilian doctors and clinics. It was becoming difficult to access. A Pentagon inspector general report released last year found that they were only allowed access to substandard facilities.
As the video above shows, FOX News will almost certainly help promote privatization.
So Hegseth, Fox, Project 2025, and Billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswami, who have never served in the military, about cutting military and veteran services as “choice” and “efficiency.” , or when talking about lipstick on a pig, please stop. Forget that it’s a big gift to already very wealthy people. The rest of us will pay.
