Back in 2022, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown visited Chillicothe to meet with local veterans and workers at the nearby VA hospital. Under a set of recommendations meant to streamline the VA, Chillicothe’s hospital was on the chopping block.
The Asset and Infrastructure Review, or AIR, Commission report, came from Trump administration effort to overhaul the country’s largest health system. Among the changes, the commission proposed shuttering the 80+ year old hospital, and replacing it with a new, but smaller facility half an hour away in Circleville. Full-service facilities in Dayton and Cincinnati would pick up some of the slack and the agency could leverage private hospitals in the area to pitch in, too.
The vets and workers — many of them checking both boxes at once — argued the commission misunderstood the Chillicothe VA’s ability to serve veterans in rural southern Ohio, and that privatizing care would lead to worse health outcomes.
In June of that year, members of the U.S. Senate Veterans Affairs Committee refused to approve nominees to implement the AIR Commission report, effectively killing the idea. Many of them cited the impact on services in rural areas of the country. Both Sen. Brown and his then-colleague, Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. Rob Portman signed on to the decision.
But one veterans’ group was furious about it.
“To say this is disappointing is an understatement,” Concerned Veterans for America’s Darin Selnick said in a press release.
“Simply put,” he went on, “this decision is short-sighted and will hurt veterans by keeping them trapped in a broken and outdated system not built to address their needs.”
The organization describes itself as delivering “people-empowering solutions rooted in liberty-based principles to tackle issues Americans face.” It describes how veterans know better than most “what happens when freedom and free markets are interfered with.”
Concerned Veterans for America is a subgroup of the Koch family political nonprofit Americans for Prosperity.
In Ohio’s current U.S. Senate race, Concerned Veterans for America Action has endorsed Republican Bernie Moreno, and Moreno’s campaign is coordinating door knocking efforts with the group. According to the CVA Action website they were out canvassing in Summit County over the weekend.
To the people who rallied to save Chillicothe’s VA hospital, Moreno partnering with the organization is a slap in the face.
Moreno’s stump speech tends to emphasize issues like inflation and the economy or immigration, rather than veteran’s affairs. But when he stopped in Chillicothe early last month he roped them all together.
Noticing a handful of vets in the crowd, he asked for a show of hands for those who served.
“When you go to the doctor, do you have a copay? Do you have a deductible? You have to make an appointment? Yes?” he asked. “Not if your illegal — if you’re an illegal alien this country no appointment go right in the emergency room.”
“This is for people broke into our country,” Moreno continued. “We have 35,000 homeless veterans in America today — 35,000 people, like these two gentlemen and others, that served this nation. For 1/100th of what we spent last year, taking care of illegals, we could’ve built every one of them a home.”
Setting aside the political rhetoric of posing immigration and caring for veterans as a kind of tradeoff, Moreno’s math is exceptionally optimistic. At a hearing in May, the Republican controlled U.S. House Budget Committee held a hearing on “The Cost of the Border Crisis,” in which they discussed a report estimating illegal immigration cost the U.S. $150.7 billion in 2023.
One hundredth of that is a little more than $1.5 billion, and spread across 35,000 veterans, you’re looking at roughly $43,000 to build a home.
Notably, a different organization, analyzing figures from 2022, determined undocumented workers paid $96.7 billion in taxes, and that total could climb an additional $40 billion with blanket work authorization.
Ohio Capital Journal reached out to Moreno’s campaign and Concerned Veterans for America. Neither responded.
The view from Chillicothe
Whatever appeal he makes, Jessica Fee sees Moreno working with Concerned Veterans for America as inexcusable.
“I find it absolutely disgraceful and disgusting to veterans in rural America,” she said.
Fee works as an organizer with American Federal Government Employees, the union representing employees at the Chillicothe VA. She argued without a VA hospital in Chillcothe, some veterans would go without care. Shifting patients to private providers will only burden a rural health care system struggling to keep up and the drive to other facilities is long and potentially daunting for elderly patients or family members, she said.
Fee pointed to her parents as an example. After an accident her dad was taken to an OSU hospital in Columbus, but her mom hasn’t been behind the wheel in years. Her dad insisted on doing his rehab at the Chillicothe VA.
“And I said you know dad if we can’t get you in there, how about Dayton or Cincinnati in a VA? And he said, I have spent over 50 years with your mother. I will not be somewhere she cannot get to me,” Fee said.
“And that’s the reality,” she added. “That’s the veteran that we take care of.”
Thomas Yeager is a retired senior master sergeant with the U.S. Air Force, and after that he worked at the Chillicothe VA for about nine years as the facility’s IT supervisor.
He acknowledged that the AIR Commission report had a point—VA facilites, by and large, are pretty old and could probably use investments in modernization. But he also expressed deep reservations about closing the hospital with only a promise of building a new clinic in Circleville.
“I was very concerned that they would say, ok we’re going to go ahead and close it down and then we’ll build the new facility and that the new facility would never be built,” he said.
Yeager argued many of the VA’s employees are veterans themselves and that kind of move would be a disaster for the local economy.
“Closing that facility would’ve been a double whammy for the veterans that work there,” he explained, “You know, losing their job as well as losing their access to local health care.”
He argued while Republican politicians align themselves with the military, they’re often absent when it comes to meeting the needs of veterans. Yeager pointed to ongoing efforts to privatize VA care — the AIR Commission being just the latest example.
Lisa Parker heads up the Jackson County Democratic Party and she’s a reserve Army officer. She argued that by focusing on treating veterans, VA facilities have niche expertise that private health care systems just can’t replicate.
“There are veteran specific illnesses, injuries and mental health problems, that the average community doesn’t see, doesn’t understand, and doctors often misdiagnose or overlook,” she said.
Like Fee, she described how her family members saw a difference. Her uncle and husband both developed chronic issues from exposure to agent orange, and her son is dealing with a traumatic brain injury and ongoing health problems related to burn pits from his service in Iraq.
She added that for veterans who are survivors of sexual violence or who are dealing with PTSD it can be easier to speak with someone at the VA.
“Veterans will open up with other veterans,” she said. “they’re not going to talk to anybody on the outside because they just shut down. You don’t understand? They just shut down.”
As for Concerned Veterans for America joining forces with Moreno, Parker argued they don’t understand rural America.
“So yeah, it’s easy to say, let’s do away with that and modernize because we’ve got 15 hospitals in our cities,” she said. “We’ve got two hospital systems, Adena and Holzer, that cover Southeastern Ohio.”
Fee was even more dismissive.
“I guess if that’s who you have to have knocking on doors for you,” she said. “But I hope they’re actually honest in their messaging and say we want to close your local VA hospital, we don’t believe veterans need care in rural America, only the ones in the cities.”
This story was originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal and is republished here with permission.
