March 7, 2025
The Honorable Mark Warner
The Honorable Tim Kaine
The Honorable Eugene Vindman
Dear Senators Warner and Kaine and Representative Vindman,
I am writing to call your attention to an October 17, 2024, article in the Washington Post, “Senate Report: How private equity ‘gutted’ dozens of U.S. hospitals,” and how this threatens healthcare for veterans.
The article discusses a report by Senator Markey (D. MA), which reveals the devastating results for patients in hospitals owned by the for-profit firm, Steward Health Care. Steward closed half-dozen hospitals, “leaving patients health care providers without jobs,” and “death rates for conditions like heart failure at Steward hospitals increased even as they decreased nationwide.”
In addition, there were bat infestations, sewage leaks, a lack of crucial supplies, and lawsuits from unpaid vendors. A Boston Globe investigation reveals that Steward hospitals received a disproportionate number of patient safety warnings from federal officials.
This problem is not limited to Steward. In These Are the Plunderers, Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner devote a chapter to the negative impact private-equity firm have on U.S. hospitals. Morgenson and Rosner focus on Healthcare Corporation of America (HCA), one of the nation’s largest healthcare providers. The authors detail staff and equipment shortages and failures in patient safety. Morgenson and Rosner’s findings are confirmed by a 2023 multipart NBC series on HCA. The NBC series reported on roaches in operating rooms, staffing shortages, pressure to assign patients to hospice care to reduce mortality rates, and staff concerns that HCA is putting profits over patient safety. For example, a U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services 2023 report cited the HCA hospital in Asheville, NC for delays in care, neglect, long waits for lab work, unapproved and expired medications, and many other failures. A June 2024,CBS report on for-profit nursing homes, which now constitute 70 percent of such facilities in the U.S., found similar issues.
This is the healthcare system that Congress is bent on pushing veterans into. Increasingly the nation’s entire healthcare system is controlled by private corporations, whose goal is profit rather than patient safety and good outcomes. Numerous studies have clearly demonstrated that VA care is equal to and often superior to private care and is more cost effective. The VA is the only entity suited to treat medical and psychological issues specific to military service, including PTSD, military sexual trauma, and exposure to toxic substances.
It is a betrayal of the nation’s promise to care for those who served to send veterans to this broken system. I call on you and your colleagues to halt and reverse the privatization of the VA Healthcare System (VHA). You know, or should know, the failings of corporate healthcare.
Anything other than preserving and strengthening the VHA is a failure to meet your responsibility to America’s veterans.
Sincerely,
James Landrith
Woodbridge, VA
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Sent via Veterans for Peace.