Courage or Complicity: Which Vets on the Ballot Are Defending VA Care?

In this crucial mid-term election year, men and women who served in the military are wooing voters by presenting themselves as tougher, more effective foes of MAGA incumbents and even long-serving Democrats.

In Massachusetts, a 50-year old former Marine captain, whose career has inspired other vets to run for office, is playing the vet (and youth) card in his September 1 primary challenge to nearly 80-year -old Senator Ed Markey. 

“We can’t just have people who seem like tired old Democrats,” says U.S. Representative Seth Moulton, who is giving up his House seat to challenge Markey. To illustrate his point, Moulton recently did some rhetorical muscle-flexing in May, when a fellow post 9/11 combat vet—DOD Secretary Pete Hegseth— told a Congressional hearing in May that the U.S. war on Iran was “an astounding military success.”  

Across the country, other anti-MAGA “service candidates” have questioned billions in new Pentagon spending on another Middle Eastern war—and criticized a simultaneous Trump assault on domestic social programs, immigrants and labor, civil liberties and voting rights, and environmental protection. 

Unfortunately, not every Democrat who served in the military is equally vocal about saving the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) from a failed bi-partisan experiment with privatization that began a decade ago, under the Obama Administration. During Trump’s second presidency, not only is public provision of healthcare for nine million former service members at risk; so are the good union jobs for 100,000 veterans employed by the (VA) as their caregivers.

Where politicians stand on the issue often reflects their own class background, rank in the military, and material circumstances after they return to civilian life.

Undermined by Outsourcing

As reported for years by CounterPunch, the direct care capacity of the VA has been seriously undermined by out-sourcing to the private healthcare industry. Most Democrats then in Congress—like Moulton– helped President Trump pass the VA MISSION of 2018, one his biggest first-term legislative victories. This accelerated a disastrous shift from inhouse to private sector care via the Veterans Community Care Program (VCCP).

Since then, tens of billions of dollars–which should have been spent on the VA’s own high-quality, specialized treatment–has instead diverted to over 1.7 million private doctors and hospitals. This coming year, nearly a third of all VA spending on medical services will be diverted to Medicare-style reimbursement of outside vendors, who have less training and experience caring for veterans. 

As a new RAND study found, vets referred outside the VA had only marginally improved access, while the cost of their care increased. In Massachusetts, the Boston Globe  found that Bay State VA facilities are suffering from staff cuts, fragmentation of patient care that was much better coordinated when delivered inhouse and longer in-house wait times, and.   

Ivy League Officers

 As noted below, vets who come from working class backgrounds and/or held blue collar jobs need VA care and benefits far more than former members of the officer class. The latter include Hegseth and Moulton, who graduated from Ivy League schools and then did post-graduate work at the same one (Harvard) before, respectively getting hired as a broker on Wall Street or corporate manager. 

So it’s not surprising that neither appreciates the importance of VA care to lower-income vets; instead, both men believe that “government healthcare” has failed and favor its privatization. In contrast, U.S. House candidate Joanna Mendoza’s defense of the VA is personal, powerful, and reflects her poverty-stricken past as the daughter of immigrant cotton-pickers in Arizona. 

In her race against House Member Juan Ciscomani, a pro-Trump Republican, she is playing up a resume that includes combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus serving as a rare female drill instructor in the Marines. As she told the Times last month, she was sexually assaulted twice by fellow members of the Corps (only one of whom was punished) and, as a result, struggled with alcohol to the point of getting busted for drunk driving in 2012.

 She’s sober now and “a queer single mother,” who gets her healthcare from the Tucson VA Medical Center. A former Medicaid recipient, she “opposes privatizing Medicare” because it is leading to “higher prices and worse care for patients.”

Her VA-related positions are exceptionally detailed and reflect first-hand experience with a range of services. In Congress, she says will fight to fully fund and protect the VA from “reckless DOGE cuts,” plus: 

She will work to expand VA specialty care in rural communities, increase access through telehealth and mobile services, and fix transportation barriers by improving eligibility and reimbursement rates. She will support legislation that strengthens mental health services, expands housing support, and invests in job training and transition programs. She will also work to modernize VA electronic health records to improve coordination of care and strengthen protections against predatory “claim sharks” who exploit veterans seeking benefits. 

A Petition To Collins

In North Carolina, former Army paratrooper Richard Ojeda won a Democratic primary candidate in that state’s deep red 9th^th Congressional district. He is now waging an uphill fight against Richard Hudson, a well-connected House Republican. The descendent of union coal miners who immigrated from Mexico to West Virginia, Ojeda wants “to go to Congress and raise hell for the working class…the people who punch a clock, serve this country, raise families, and still feel abandoned by the political establishment.” 

He is a vocal defender of the rights of immigrants and workers, supporting public education and Medicaid expansion, rather than cuts, and rallying fellow VA patients against DOGE-driven staffing shortages. Earlier in his campaign, Ojeda took an unusual step in electoral politics, by organizing his own future constituents to take grassroots action to defend VA care.

 He collected ninety thousand signatures on a petition protesting the Trump administration’s attacks on the VA patients and their unionized caregivers. Then, he and his supporters personally delivered the petition to agency officials in Washington. It demanded that VA Secretary Doug Collins reject an “unlawful executive order” issued by Trump that “rips out long-standing civil rights protections and opens the door to denying VA care based on marital status, sexual orientation, religion, or even voting for a Democrat.”

 During his successful Democratic primary campaign this year, Ojeda found encouraging signs that former Trump supporters are having second thoughts as “they’re looking around at the wreckage so far, the ICE kidnappings, the censorship, and the economic pain.” More people, he believes, “are realizing that they were pawns in the oldest con in the book—blame immigrants, blame workers, blame anyone who doesn’t look or pray or live the day you do.” 

As he told us for our new book, Courage or Complicity?, “People are waking up. They’re angry, and they damn well should be. We have to talk to people who were misled by Trump and give them something to believe in other than a cult of personality. If you give people something worth fighting for, they will fight for each other.” 

Stop the Exploitation

In Omaha a former National Guard member and Navy veteran Dan Osborn figured out a few years ago that not enough fellow Nebraskans would vote for him as a Democrat. In 2026, he’s making his second highly competitive bid for the U.S. Senate as a labor-backed independent. 

Osborn became a public figure in his home state by leading a successful eleven-week strike by five hundred fellow workers at a Kellogg’s cereal factory in Omaha. Before working in that plant for eighteen years and becoming local union president, he dropped out of college and joined the military. When Kellogg’s fired him after the strike, he became a working member of Steamfitters Local 644 and began repairing boiler systems. 

Osborn’s wide-ranging blue-collar agenda highlights the need for labor law reform, minimum wage increases, paid family leave, stronger rail safety enforcement, and consumer protection measures.  His campaign platform makes the singular bold-faced demand: “Stop Privatization of the VA!” He goes on to explain, as few other candidates have ever done, who is harmed and who is helped by outsourcing:

Privatization was sold as a solution for rural veterans who live far from VA facilities. The reality is that veterans in private systems face longer wait times, less coordinated care, and providers who are not trained in the unique health needs of those who served. The private sector is not equipped to handle the mental health challenges, burn pit exposure, and service-related conditions that our veterans carry home with them. Companies like UnitedHealth are lobbying aggressively to steer veterans and their healthcare dollars into private hands. I will fight to protect and strengthen the VA, not dismantle it for the benefit of Wall Street.

Meanwhile, Osborn is the rare politician with uncertain medical coverage of this own, because he doesn’t have job-based, union negotiated medical benefits, when he takes months off from work to campaign. Unlike Mendoza and Ojeda, he never sought a disability rating from the VA, based on a service related condition, that would have allowed him to use its hospitals and clinics in Nebraska. 

Now, with help from a local veterans’ service organization, he trying to become VA eligible. He told us that he is “very grateful for the existence of the VA, and the workers who are meeting the needs of veterans in our communities. The men and women who have signed on the dotted line to serve our country deserve every benefit they receive.”

Doubling Down on VA Criticism

In contrast, Seth Moulton first burnished his resume as a “political rebel” by bucking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, eight years ago and helping then GOP minorities in Congress, under Trump I, greatly expand VA privatization. 

During his four-month vanity campaign for the presidency in 2020, Moulton touted his past work with Republicans on passage of the Faster Care for Veterans Act. Signed into law by President Obama, this bill directed the VA to experiment with an online self-scheduling app for its patients—an innovation, which according to Moulton, allowed them to make doctor appointments “from their smart phones or computers with the click of a button.”

However, as Rick Weidman pointed out when he was legislative director of Vietnam Veterans of America: “Scheduling apps just mean that one veteran gets ahead of someone else in line.” The real challenge, then and now, is properly funding and staffing VA hospitals and clinics so they have enough caregivers to assist all the new patients coming through the door. “You don’t do that with a scheduling app,” Weidman told us four years ago. You do that by filling thousands of VA vacancies, which now, thanks the Trump Administration, have become even more numerous. 

In his current bid to replace Ed Markey in the Senate, Moulton has made some populist head feints that weirdly conflate valid criticism of corporate healthcare with his usual VA bashing. To wit, this fund-raising text sent from “Seth for Massachusetts” to one of us several months ago:

 Steve, private equity killed another Massachusetts hospital. They gutted Steward Health Care, pocketed millions, and left communities without emergency rooms. People are dying for Wall Street profits. I’ve seen government healthcare fail at the VA, and I’ve watched private equity destroy our hospitals. That’s why I’ll fight for a public option that actually works—and ban hedge funds from playing God with our healthcare. 

To better understand what this supposedly more workable “public option” for veterans might look like—and how it might differ from the VA’s  existing nationwide public healthcare system–  we repeatedly contacted Moulton’s campaign, by email and phone. We also sought further information about his own personal experience as a VA patient, which in a Boston Globe interview more than a decade ago, he claimed was bad. No one, including his press secretary, ever responded.

Turning to Moulton’s campaign website, we learned, however, that his alternative to “one-size-fits-all government healthcare” for former service members is “a health plan that competes directly with private insurers and lowers premiums for everyone.” It will, of course, “recruit the best doctors and managers to run it and learn from all the VA’s mistakes.”

A Profile in Courage?

VoteVets, the leading Democratic Party-aligned independent spender on vets running for office has already dumped more than $12 million dollars into 2026 races. Moulton and Mendoza are among its endorsed candidates; Ojeda and Osborn, who has twice spurned the DP label, are not.

 However, VoteVets seems to ignore the fact that Moulton has been such a poor soldier in the “fight against ongoing attempts to privatize our Department of Veterans’ Affairs health care,” one of its own stated policy priorities. To be fair, others in Congress who joined Moulton in voting for the VA MISSION Act of 2018—which supercharged privatization during the Trump-Biden-Trump Administrations—didn’t lose VoteVets support either, including Senators Tami Duckworth (D-Ill), Mark Kelly (D-AR), Jack Reed (D-RI), and Gary Peters (D-MI), who is not running for re-election year. 

Whose Courage Can Save Us?

In a new book called Courage Can Save Us—praised in the NY Times as a “thoughtful, hopeful” account of “service candidates” with “a common mission”—progressive populists like Mendoza, Ojeda, and Osborn are never mentioned. Instead, the ex-Marine from Massachusetts gets a gushing chapter hailing him as one of “ten extraordinary Americans” whose role, as veterans engaged in politics and policy making, is critical for “the fight for our future.” 

By no coincidence the author of the book is Rye Barcott, a former Marine Corps captain who served with Moulton in the Middle East. Barcott is now co-founder and CEO of With Honor, which he describes as “a cross-partisan organization that fights polarization by supporting principled veteran leadership in public office.”  Not mentioned in the book or its acknowledgements is Jeff Bezos, the world’s fourth richest man and a distinctly polarizing figure in multiple fields. In 2018, he helped launch the With Honor Fund with a $10 million personal donation; his brother Mike, still serves on the group’s advisory board.  

With Honor Action, an allied group, recently unveiled “new data showing a wave of military veterans stepping forward to serve in Congress: 752 veterans across all 50 states have run or are running for federal office this cycle, the highest number With Honor Action has tracked since it began monitoring veteran candidates in 2018.”

If elected—or re-elected– how many of the corporate Democrats and MAGA Republicans on that list of 752—will be real champions of other vets? Based on the track record of those already serving on Capitol Hill and currently supporting, rather than opposing, VA privatization, the answer is not many. Electing two, three, many Seth Moultons—and/or sending him to the Senate—will definitely not help the overwhelming majority of vets who value the VA and hope it will survive the Trump II-era.

 

The post Courage or Complicity: Which Vets on the Ballot Are Defending VA Care? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Steve Early – Suzanne Gordon.