MARK FOREMAN: He was fired because he wasn’t cooperating with those in Congress and the Koch brothers and Steven Cohen, who see that they can make quite a profit for themselves if they can privatize the VA. I think Shulkin, in the time he was there, I felt he was truly wanting to help veterans, but he just wasn’t willing to get on the band wagon of privatizing the VA. And so I do believe that that’s behind why Trump decided that he needed to get rid of him and they used the excuse of the travel (on taxpayer funds when) he and his wife went to England, I think it was. So they used that as an excuse to get rid of him. Now he wants to appoint Dr. (Ronny) Jackson as secretary of the VA, and as I understand it, Dr. Jackson has no administrative experience. He’s never worked in a big bureaucracy. He’s just a doctor, starting with George Bush and Obama and now, Trump. So he doesn’t have the experience a secretary would need because the VA is the second largest bureaucracy in the U.S. government. They have a budget of about $200 billion a year. And, for someone who’s never had any administrative experience, it’s just absurd that Trump would want someone like Dr. Jackson to take over.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Mark, who would profit and who would suffer if the veteran’s administration and their medical system for veterans were to be privatized?
MARK FOREMAN: Well, right away, who would suffer would be the veterans. I’m totally convinced of that. Here’s what I’ve learned over the last five decades. When we came back from Vietnam, they (the VA) didn’t know anything about post-traumatic stress disorder and it didn’t really start to gain acceptance that post-traumatic stress disorder was real until the 1980s. And the care that we got back in the ’70s and ’80s was just really horrible. All the doctors knew what to do, how to deal with us was to give us drugs, not only for our physical pain but for our moral and emotional pain. So I went through that whole period with drugs. Thank goodness I was able to find something other than drugs, which is meditation. But I was lucky. I was really lucky to find meditation and I was good at it and it allowed me to accept the pain.
Now, those who are going to gain, that’s obvious. We have 9 million veterans who are registered at the VA for health care and out of 22 million veterans here in the United States, there’s a little over 22 million of us. So I’m sure the Koch brothers are looking at the numbers of potential new patients and patients that have horrific injuries. You know, if we were to privatize, which I sure hope we don’t, sending veterans to try the hospitals is going to cost the taxpayers 30 percent more than at the VA. The VA is a single-payer system where the government signs big contracts with pharmaceuticals and doctors work for less money at the VA than they do in the private sector. it’s going to cost all of the citizens of this nation more money if he gets away with this privatization.
BETWEEN THE LINES: How are Veterans for Peace, your organization and other groups around the country organizing to oppose the Trump and Republican party agenda to privatize the veterans administration?
MARK FOREMAN: When we started hearing about this privatization effort that the Koch brothers were orchestrating, we’ve formed what we call a VA privatization working group – anti-privatization working group. And right now there’s about 20 of us on committee and the main thing that we emphasize is that all veterans need to call their Congress representatives, both the House and the Senate, and let them know that you are opposed to this privatization effort. This is the most important thing. We as veterans and any citizens who care about veterans need to be calling and contacting their House and Senate representatives, letting them know that you, we’re opposed to this.
If this goes through, if Congress passes a bill that is going to privatize the VA, you are going to see a lot of extremely angry veterans.
