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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 of the VA Hospital in Madison.
Trump administration doge cuts to VA health care 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 roundtable in Madison with veterans patients and employees
to hear about it.
The mass firings that we have seen have had
real real impact
appointments are being
canceled
because there is not a provider there to see them. I went out there and and I was
deployed. I don't know how many times, but I did it and I just called and
they reglude 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. That's right. I have been getting calls.
Um, where
many highly service connected, many with, you know, fragile mental health
are afraid that their benefits will be taken and
and I have had more than once say, well, then I'll just kill myself. It's horrifying.
The retired physician at the VA in Madison Lee mentioned was also at that roundtable bringing his
inside knowledge. Dr. Michael Seiber says the cuts have led to disastrous problems for veteran
self-care. 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 those people that are senior advisors now working at the Veterans Administration. The leadership and 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 83,000 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.
So there are problems. What are some other examples of the real-world consequences inside these hospitals?
Well, 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 their rooms.
The RNs are cleaning the OR and surgeries are delayed while they're doing that cleaning.
So what are your former colleagues they're telling you about
conditions like that inside for both health care but also morale?
Well, morale is terrible.
The fear about what's going to happen, not knowing what it's going to be, the fact that
there was a mandate that everybody working from home
had to come to the hospital. People are jam-packed in.
You know, this happened with a suicide prevention hotline and
there was no confidentiality. People were working out of closets or, you know, 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're 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 Seibert.
It's my pleasure. Thank you.
It's really scary.
It's terrible. Yeah, it's terrible.
Oh, you know, the whole goal, I should have said this,
but the whole goal is to privatize all medical health care for veterans.
Is that stated? I haven't seen that.
It's been stated, yeah.
But it is pretty sub-rose at the current time.
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.
Wouldn't probably be accurate or 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 them.
But we're losing psychologists, we're losing psychiatrists.
So it's becoming more difficult to take care of those people.
All right. Well, again, thank you.
Okay.
And we were just before we...