On April Fool’s Day, over a hundred veterans, former VA employees and local healthcare activists met at a Veterans Town Hall in the Veterans’ Memorial Building in Santa Rosa, California. The meeting was called to alert veterans and the local community to the cost and consequences of “The Tragic Dismantling of the VA.” A number of veterans groups, like Veterans for Peace, Veterans of Sonoma County and local community members who, for the past year, have spent every Friday rallying in front of the Santa Rosa Community Based Outpatient Clinic (CBOC), sponsored the event.
“Twenty -five people were just out there today in the rain,” Helen Effron, a retired VA Nurse Practitioner, who is a member of Veterans of Sonoma County told me this past Friday. “We’re former VA employees, as well as veterans and their families and we come every week to inform Sonoma County veterans and the community at large about the actions Donald Trump and his VA Secretary Doug Collins are taking to dismantle the Veterans Health Administration (VHA ) and how this will impact Sonoma County and the entire country,”
Effron, along with former Santa Rosa VA CBOC Chief Medical Officer Ginger Schechter and Kym Valadez, who was the president of NFFE (National Federation of Federal Employees) Local One, is determine to make sure that veterans aren’t fooled by VA Secretary Doug Collins’ assurances that pushing more veterans into a taxpayer funded private sector healthcare network – The Veterans Community Care Program (VCCP — is providing them with more – and better — healthcare choices. The VCCP now outsources more than 40% of VHA care to over 1.7 million private sector contractors who have little or no understanding of veterans’ complex health conditions. This program is cannibalizing the VHA’s inhouse delivery of clinical care to the tune of over $30 billion in FY 2026. As studies have shown, the VCCP delivers care that is of lower quality, and less timely, and conveniently located than care delivered by the VHA, which is equal or superior to that provided by the private sector…