Friday, April 5, 2019

How Ex-congressman Jeff Miller is Single-handedly Shaping the Push to Privatize VA Healthcare

The Indian Treaty Room is a grand two-story meeting space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, with French and Italian marble wall panels, a pattern of stars on the ceiling and the image of a compass worked into the tiled floor. Over the years, it has hosted signing ceremonies for historic foreign policy pacts such as the Bretton Woods agreement and the United Nations Charter.
On Nov. 16, 2017, it hosted a different kind of gathering: an intimate meeting called by the White House to discuss the future of the Department of Veterans Affairs. In the 10 months since Donald Trump had taken office, his administration had been pushing a bold and controversial agenda to privatize more of the VA’s services.
The Trump administration’s ambitions are well documented. But what has not been publicly revealed until now is the extent to which the VA – a sprawling agency with a $180 billion annual budget that includes the nation’s single largest health care system, a network of cemeteries and a massive bureaucracy that administers the GI Bill and disability compensation for wounded veterans – has become a massive feeding trough for the lobbying industry.  
e-mail obtained through FOIA request
The VA’s then secretary, David Shulkin, was at the previously undisclosed meeting, along with a contingent of conservative thinkers on veterans policy, including current and former members of Concerned Veterans for America, known as CVA, an advocacy network largely backed by conservative donors Charles and David Koch. Also present were “Fox & Friends” host Pete Hegseth, a former CVA executive repeatedly floated to be Trump’s pick for VA secretary, and David Urban, a right-leaning CNN commentator who served as a senior adviser on the Trump campaign.
During an intimate November 2017 meeting called by the White House, attendees drafted a strategy to “echo/amplify” President Donald Trump’s “priorities/initiatives” for accelerating the privatization process at the VA.
According to emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the group drafted a strategy to “echo/amplify” Trump’s “priorities/initiatives” for accelerating the privatization process. According to three people who were there, the participants discussed how best to respond to expected resistance from traditional veterans advocates, who historically have opposed privatizing key agency services. Representatives from “the Big Six” major veterans organizations, including the American Legion and Veterans for Foreign Wars, were not invited.
But it was the presence of the most powerful lobbyist for the companies now trying to get a piece of the VA’s budget – a tan, affable Floridian named Jeff Miller – that would have raised the most eyebrows, had his attendance been known at the time.

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