Senator Johnson is expected to
join us next week.
The Department of Veterans Affairs
is in crisis.
Those are the words of a retired
physician of 27 years at
the VA hospital in Madison.
Trump administration doge cuts to
VA healthcare are having real life
consequences to the some nine
million patients and their care
teams and providers across the
country.
This week, Senator Baldwin held a
round table in Madison with
veterans, patients and employees.
To hear about it.
The mass firings that we have
seen have had real
impact.
Appointments are being
canceled because
there is not a provider
there to see them.
I went out there and I was
deployed, I don't know how
many times, but I did it and I just
called and they re-glued
my feet together and I put my boots
back on and I went back out there.
I just enjoyed my job
so much because we
had the sense that
our Congress, our Senate and
our President and those offices
would take care of us
because we were taking care of
what they were asking us to do.
I have been getting calls
where
many highly
service-connected, many with,
you know, fragile mental health
are afraid
that their benefits will be
taken.
And I have had more than
one say, oh, then I'll
just kill myself.
Uh-uh.
It's horrifying.
The retired physician at the VA in
Madison, we mentioned, was also at
that roundtable bringing his inside
knowledge.
Dr. Michael Siebers says the cuts
have led to disastrous problems
for veterans' health He joins
us now. Dr., thanks for being here.
Thank you.
So we know that the VA secretary
wants to cut the agency's workforce
by about 83,000
employees, but vows not to take
any frontline health care
workers. What's your knowledge about
who's been let go?
Or who's leaving because of
the kind of uncertainty of it all.
Well, it's very hard to get
exact data, but it's
clear that even with
the cuts that have been made so
far,
services have been worsened
for veterans.
So it's only going to get worse
as time goes by.
You said that there's a certain
secrecy about what's happening,
how so?
There is a secrecy.
There are Doge people that
are senior advisors now working
at the Veterans Administration.
The leadership in the 170
different medical centers around
the country have had to
sign non-disclosure agreements.
The people on the ground, the people
working in the VA hospital, don't
know what's going to happen.
They're very fearful about the cuts.
They're a group of people who are
quite dedicated to taking care
of veterans.
And you have some understanding that
there may be more kind
of announced cuts next week.
That's what I've heard, that there
will be more cuts coming.
I think it's pretty clear they're
not at the eighty three thousand
level yet and
there have already been significant
issues.
I talked with one veteran who
said when she called the
hospital the phone rang
and nobody answered it for
an extended period of time and she
ended up just hanging up.
There are problems.
What are some other examples
of the real world consequences
inside these hospitals?
You know, it's been reported
that some
hospitals have been without police
so that there hasn't been policing
at the facilities.
At the Middleton VA hospital
where I work, they have
a shortage of custodial staff
so that individual
persons, including secretaries
and cardiovascular surgeons,
are cleaning their own rooms,
emptying their own waste baskets.
The RNs have to clean rooms.
New patients are waiting to get into
the hospital while the RNs
clean the rooms.
The RN's are cleaning the OR
and surgeries are delayed while
they're doing that cleaning.
So what are your former colleagues
there telling you about conditions
like that inside for
both health care, but also morale?
Morale is terrible.
The fear about what's going to
happen, not knowing what it's going
be, the fact that
there was a mandate
that everybody working from home
had to come to the hospital,
people are jam-packed
in.
This happened with the suicide
prevention hotline.
There was no confidentiality.
People were working out of closets
or six at a table.
So there are a lot of things that
have happened that make it more
difficult to deliver good medical
care.
I was going to ask, how should
families, what should
they know about what all this
means for patient care?
Well, it's not good.
I mean, there are things that are
happening that make it harder to
deliver good patient care.
The pattern of loss
of people at the VA
is primarily letting go people
who are support staff, so that
the physicians, they're not letting
them go, the nurses, they are not
letting them go although
1,700 nurses
have already taken early deferred
retirement.
200 doctors we know have taken
early deferred retirement.
There was a case where in
one VA hospital, the
x-rays were piling up, there was no
radiologist to read them for
an extended period of time.
And that's a very detrimental and
dangerous situation for patients.
So what is the mindset of the
veterans the VA cares for?
Well, I think, you know, they're
of two minds.
There are a group of veterans,
a significant group, who
voted for President Trump,
and think he's doing the
right thing in most cases.
But many have reservations
in that group, and there is a group,
of course, who are
extremely upset about what's
happening.
There's also a hiring freeze.
But even so, are medical
professionals self-selecting out
of working in
VA facilities now?
I think that's the case.
We certainly know that
nurses aren't
interested in coming to work at
the Middleton VA Hospital when they
finish their training at
Madison College.
Thank you for your insight, Dr.
Michael Siebers.
It's my pleasure.
Thank you.
No, it's terrible.
Yeah, it was terrible.
So, you know, their whole goal, I
should have said this, but their
whole is to privatize all
medical health care for veterans.
Is that stated?
I haven't seen that.
It's been stated, yeah.
It is pretty
sub rosa at the current time.
They're not, the new budget for
26 has 4%
increase in
the budget for the VA,
but it's largely earmarked to
go for care in
the community with private
providers.
You know, the average private
provider visit is like 10 to 12
minutes, you know, wouldn't
probably be accurate
or. Uh...
Helpful for a patient who has
suicidality or
PTSD or
homelessness
Because that's the kind of care that
the VA kind
of has a
mission toward.
The mission is to take care of
veterans.
And if the 33,000 veterans
who are homeless need help, we try
to help them.
If all the patients with PTSD
are having trouble, we've got
a system that tries to help.
But we're losing psychologists,
we're loosing psychiatrists.
So it's becoming more difficult to
take of those people.
Alright, well, again, thank you.
And we were just before.