LGBTQ RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS

Ghana parliament approves 'anti-LGBTQ' law, awaiting president's signature

BOYCOTT GHANA THE SLAVE STATE

Ghana's parliament on Friday approved one of the most repressive anti-LGBTQ laws in Africa, which is now awaiting ratification by President John Mahama.

HUMAN RIGHTS TRUMP RELIGIOUS RITES

Issued on: 30/05/2026 - 

Ghanaian Member of Parliament and sponsor of the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill, Reverend John Ntim Fordjour, addresses the press on the day lawmakers vote on the bill, in Accra, Ghana, 29 May 2026. © Francis Kokoroko / Reuters

The law on sexual rights and family values imposes a penalty of up to three years' jail for people who engage in homosexual relations, and between three and five years for the promotion, sponsorship or intentional support of LGBT+ activities.

The bill was passed unanimously by parliament in 2024 but former president Nana Akufo-Addo did not sign it.

Under Ghana's constitution, draft legislation not signed by the president before the end of a parliamentary term automatically lapses and must be passed again by the new parliament.

The law approved Friday retains the previous bill's core provisions but includes exemptions

For example, lawyers can still represent LGBTQ clients without being penalised.

Similarly, the media will be able to address these issues and healthcare professionals will be able to provide care or psychological support to LGBT+ people without fear of reprisal.

One-third of world still criminalises consensual same-sex acts: report

Same-sex relationships are prohibited in Ghana – a conservative, deeply religious country with a Christian majority – by a law dating from the British colonial era, but there have been no prosecutions on these grounds to date.

Human rights groups and sever

al international organisations have condemned the bill.

In February 2025, Mahama said: "I believe in the principles and values that only two genders exist -- man and woman. And that marriage is between a man and a woman."

Around 60 countries in the world ban same-sex relations, about half of them are in Africa, according to the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA).

(with AFP)

EMBRACING UKRAINIAN FASCISM

RAGOZIN: Melnyk reburial signals ideological shift in Ukraine

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy attended the reburial of Andriy Melnyk, one of the leaders of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). / Volodymyr Zelenskiy via XFacebook

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By Leonid Ragozin in Riga May 29, 2026

Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy went to the National Military Memorial Cemetery to take part in the reburial of Andriy Melnyk, Adolf Hitler’s ally in World War II and one of the leaders of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Next to Zelenskiy, stood his chief of staff Kyrylo Budanov, who has been overseeing a visible ideological shift in Ukraine since assuming office early this year. 

In a tweet published on the occasion, Budanov wrote that the reburial heralds the creation of the “Pantheon of Prominent Ukrainians”. The choice of Melnyk’s ashes as an object of national veneration sends a clear signal about the direction of that shift.

Over seven years in the presidential seat, Zelenskiy has undergone a remarkable transformation from a dove seeking rapprochement with Russia to a defiant wartime leader and the Kremlin’s sworn enemy. His attitude to Ukraine’s history has changed just as radically.

Soon after he was elected in 2019 on the promise of peace, Zelensky made a point about celebrating May 9, the Soviet Victory Day, by visiting the grave of his grandfather who fought in the Red Army.

This populist gesture was designed to appeal an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians, in both the east and west of the country, whose ancestors fought on the Soviet side in WWII and who gave their votes to the new president. A memo published by Ukraine’s ministry of foreign affairs in October 2014 cites the figure of 7mn residents of Ukraine who fought in the Soviet army during WWII versus only 240-250 thousand who collaborated with the Nazis.

As his 57th Guard Division was pushing the Germans out of Mairupol, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, lieutenant Semyon Zelenskiy was avenging the deaths of his father (President Zelenskiy’s great-grandfather) and three brothers, all of whom perished in the Holocaust.

Meanwhile, Melnyk was attempting to set up a fascist Ukrainian puppet state in Ukraine with a constitution, authored by his friend Mykola Stsiborsky, which described future Ukraine as “authoritarian and totalitarian state”. In a letter to Hitler in 1941, Melnyk pleaded that anti-Soviet Ukrainians be “allowed to march shoulder to shoulder with the legions of Europe and with our liberator, the German Wermacht”. Meanwhile, his subordinates in Ukraine took part in Jewish pogroms in Bukovyna and assisted the Germans in killing the Jews elsewhere around the country.

Melnyk’s pleas fell on deaf ears in Berlin since Hitler saw Slavs as an inferior race subject to enslavement and extermination. He was interned by the Nazis in a camp for foreign VIPs, who were treated humanely and respectfully, and released in 1944 when Hitler felt Ukrainian fascists could help him stall the Red Army’s onslaught in western Ukraine. Failing to receive guarantees of a pro-Nazi Ukrainian state, Melnyk ended up offering his services to Western allies in the US-occupied zone.

The World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, Yad Vashem, stated that it was deeply troubled by Melnyk’s reburial in Kyiv. “Honouring the leader of a movement [OUN] that supported and collaborated with Nazi Germany during the persecution and murder of millions of Jews undermines the moral integrity essential to Holocaust remembrance,” its press release said.

OUN’s dream Ukraine

Melnyk died in 1964 and was buried in Luxembourg where his remains were lying peacefully until Zelenskiy’s administration decided to repatriate them in May this year. “Colonel Andriy Melnyk returned to a different Ukraine – not the one he had been forced to leave, but the one he had dreamed of,” Zelenskiy said at the reburial ceremony.

Today’s Ukraine is indeed much closer to Melnyk’s ideals than those Zelenskiy’s grandfather was fighting for.

Built in 1974 and topped with the 102m-tall Motherland statue, Kyiv’s WWII History Museum was designed to commemorate Soviet war heroes like Semyon Zelenskiy. In the WWII cult developed under the Ukraine-born Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, this was one of the three most sacred sites in the entire Soviet country.

In 2026 however, it housed an exhibition dedicated to the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC), a military unit formed by fugitive Russian neo-Nazis who believe that today’s Ukraine is much closer to their ideals than Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime. They see Putin’s Russia as a continuation of the Bolshevik internationalist project, citing Putin’s tolerance to mass immigration from Central Asian countries as proof.

In its propaganda and symbols, RVC draws inspiration from Gen. Andrey Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army which fought on Hitler’s side in WWII. Featuring prominently in the exhibition, RVC’s symbol is called Spayka, best translated as fascia. It was designed in the 1930s by the Russian emigre organisation White Cause which later joined the Russian Fascist Party. 

The exhibition was officially curated by RVC’s khorunzhy (ideological officer), Aleksey Lyovkin. Having served a sentence for racially motivated attacks on migrants in his native Tver in Russia, Lyovkin founded a band called M8L8TH (which translates as Hitler’s Hammer and contains the numerical symbol 88 that stands for Heil Hitler in skinhead jargon) before moving to Ukraine in 2015.

Although it existed in Russian imperial forces, khorunzhy is not an official rank in the Ukrainian army. It originally meant flag-bearer in the Cossack troops, but it resurfaced in the Russo-Ukrainian war as an equivalent of the Soviet politruk, a political officer. 

Officially non-existent in the Ukrainian army, khorunzhy is used as a rank in politically autonomous units that form what its members call the “Azov family” or “movement”. Born out of the original Azov battalion, this far right mega-group currently controls Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps commanded by Andriy Biletsky, its founder and political leader. 

The 3rd Corps runs its own school of political officers which is named after Yevhen Konovalets, Melnyk’s predecessor as the OUN leader. Its political bible is Natiocracy, an ethnonationalist teaching of OUN ideologist and Melnyk’s ally, Mykola Stsiborsky.

The Azov battalion in its original forms had a significant presence of Russian neo-Nazis, like Lyovkin or the most prominent living Russian neo-Nazi leader Sergey “Malyuta” Korotkikh, who was in charge of the battalion’s intelligence. 

These Russians (though not Korotkikh) eventually formed the core of RVC, which ideologically is a part of the Azov family but operates under the auspices of Ukraine’s military intelligence, the HUR. The latter was headed by Zelenskiy’s chief of staff Budanov from 2020 to 2026.

An ideology for New Europe

Melnyk’s reburial would be hard to imagine under Zelenskiy’s previous chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, who graduated from secondary school in the Soviet times and whose father served at the USSR’s embassy in Kabul during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. His Russian-born mother grew up in Leningrad. Hardly famous for political restraint, he still displayed some ethical red lines when it comes to history and politics.

But Yermak took upon himself the role of chief scapegoat in a massive anti-corruption investigation that targets Zelenskiy’s immediate entourage. He has been formally charged in a multilayered corruption case which involves four mansions, one of which belongs to him and another one likely to Zelenskiy himself. 

Budanov is another story. Born in 1986, he is largely a product of post-independence Ukraine with all of its geopolitical ambivalences and mafia state realities. An ideological orphan, he was provided with a social lift when he joined unit A2245 of the HUR whose members were trained by the CIA. 

A Washington Post investigation, published in 2023, revealed that the military intelligence agency Budanov would become the head of was created under the CIA’s supervision from scratch and hermetically sealed from other Ukrainian spy agencies to avoid Russian interference. The HUR is “our baby”, the newspaper’s CIA source boasted. Since the end of WWII, the CIA’s Ukrainian operation has been defined by the influx of OUN cadres who previously worked for the Germans. 

Ideology is a swear word with the liberal-democratic paradigm which Ukraine is still ostensibly pursuing, but Zelenskiy’s chief of staff is not shy about using the word. 

“Ukraine today embodies true Europe — both geographically and, above all, ideologically,” he wrote on May 9, the day of the Soviet victory over the Nazis, also marked as Europe Day in the EU. “We are defending the security and values of the entire continent: freedom, respect and the right to one’s identity,” he continued, adding the word “identity” where centrist politicians would normally mention human rights or social justice. 

His ideology reveals itself in commemorative events like Melnyk’s reburial, which he organised. Zelenskiy named Budanov first when listing officials who helped to make it happen. It also spills into his sometimes surprising statements, like when he mused on the meaning of Rus, the Kyiv-centred medieval state which gave its name to Russia. “Rus is Ukraine. But Rus is more, much more and Ukraine is the motherland of everything, even of those who we are fighting against,” he told the audience at the Kyiv Stratcom Forum this month. “You see where is the issue: We have handed over much of our history to them, we did it voluntarily. They privatised it, although they are nobody. We are the Rus, we should rule them.”

These imperial sentiments hark back to the ideas first expressed by Azov Movement ideologists back in 2014-16. They boil down to recreating the Russian Empire, only with the capital in Kyiv rather than Moscow.

Budanov’s effort to build the pantheon of Ukrainian heroes is expected to bring more results in the coming months and years. Negotiations are underway with the US and European countries about the repatriation of prominent Ukrainians who died in exile, prominently featuring OUN leader Stepan Bandera and Simon Petlyura who led Ukrainian nationalists in the Russian civil war. 

But Zelenskiy mentioned only one figure who is going to be reburied for sure. It is Yevhen Konovalets, who headed the OUN before Bander and Melnyk and after whose name the Azov Movement’s ideological school bears.

Leonid Ragozin is a freelance journalist based in Riga. He covered Russia, Ukraine and other countries for leading global media, including the BBC, Bloomberg and Al Jazeera. Leonid co-authored “En eiropeisk tragedie”, a book about the roots of Russo-Ukranian conflict published in Norway.

Report Highlights ‘Uniquely Poor Performance’ of US For-Profit Health System Compared to Other Nations

“We know what high-performing health systems look like—other countries have them and are building them. It’s high time the US did better.”


Members of National Nurses United rally with lawmakers to show their support for the Medicare For All Act in Upper Senate Park on Capitol Hill on April 29, 2025 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Julia Conley
May 28, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

An annual analysis that examines healthcare systems across nearly two dozen wealthy countries around the world once again highlighted the United States’ “uniquely poor performance relative to its peers,” with this year’s US Health Care from a Global Perspective report focusing on “insurance coverage and access to care, affordability of care, delivery of care, and equity of health outcomes.”

As advocates for expanding the US Medicare system to the entire population have long warned, the country’s for-profit healthcare system—which ties the ability to get care to one’s employment and allows insurance companies to boost profits by denying care to patients—“The US, on average, has the poorest health outcomes of any high-income country,” the Commonwealth Fund’s report reads.

The report examines the US system compared with other countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), including the United Kingdom, France, New Zealand, Japan, and Mexico.

It finds that the US spent 18% of its gross domestic product on healthcare in 2024—nearly twice the OECD average.

Life expectancy in the US reached an all-time high in 2024, but was still among the shortest when compared to the 19 other countries, nearly five years shorter than Japan, Spain, and Switzerland, and longer than the average lifespan in Turkey and Mexico.

While the US and Mexico also both rank high on the list in terms of preventable deaths, the latter nation announced last month that it would soon be joining every other country included in the analysis by shifting to a universal, government-run healthcare system.

In the United States, the for-profit health sector—which spent a record $877.69 million on lobbying last year—contributes to the high number of avoidable deaths, which stands at 312 per 100,000 people. About 27 million Americans are still uninsured, more than 16 years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and the Republican Party’s refusal to continue ACA subsidies last year as well as its $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts over the next decade, according to Thursday’s report, are “projected to increase the number of uninsured Americans by an additional 17 million by 2034, potentially leading to more than 50,000 additional preventable deaths annually.”

“By contrast, Mexico’s recently established Universal Health Service will provide all residents with access to free care at any public health institute, starting in 2027,” the report states. “The US is one of the only countries to have enacted policies that reduce coverage.”

High out-of-pocket costs may also contribute to poor outcomes and the high number of preventable deaths in the US, the Commonwealth Fund suggests. Americans spend $400 per person, per year, on out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs, while people in France spend $100.

“The US is one of the only countries to have enacted policies that reduce coverage.”

“In the US, where approximately 8% of the population is uninsured and one-quarter has coverage that comes with high out-of-pocket costs or deductibles, people are far more likely to forgo needed care because of costs than people in peer countries,” reads the report. “This can mean not filling prescriptions, not obtaining diagnostic tests, treatment, or follow-up care, or being unable to adhere to clinician-recommended care plans.”

The report also identifies the US as a country that lags behind its peers in producing new doctors, contributing to a crisis in primary care, with the US having the fewest number of primary care providers per 1,000 people. The country also has the “highest medical tuition fees of any country in our analysis,” said the Commonwealth Fund.

The organization also found that in 2023, the US had nearly 19 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births, representing a decline for the country that has long had “among the highest rates of maternal deaths related to complications of pregnancy and childbirth.”

“By contrast, in 11 of the 18 countries we studied there were less than five maternal deaths per 100,000 live births,” reads the report, which also notes that in the US, maternal mortality is “exceptionally high” among Black women, at 50 deaths per 100,000 live births.

“This far exceeds national maternal mortality in any of the other countries,” the report states. “Inequities in access to care and patients’ care experiences—often rooted in discrimination and clinician bias—may be prime contributing factors.”

Dr. Joseph Betancourt, president of the Commonwealth Fund, noted that “the US has long prided itself on having the best healthcare in the world, but the population benefits from this excellence unevenly, and it remains largely out of reach for many Americans.”

“We spend more than any other nation on healthcare, so our poorer health outcomes aren’t due to a lack of resources—it is about how we choose to use them,” said Betancourt. “We know what high-performing health systems look like—other countries have them and are building them. It’s high time the US did better.”

“Other countries have shown that alternatives work. What’s striking isn’t the absence of solutions; it’s our reluctance to implement them.”

The report does not explicitly call on the US to shift to a universal, government-funded healthcare system, but studies have shown that expanding Medicare to the entire US population, as lawmakers including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have consistently demanded, would address many of the problems listed in the report.

Studies by the Congressional Budget Office and Yale University have shown that Medicare for All would save an estimated $650 billion and prevent 68,000 avoidable deaths each year.

The policy, which has been proposed in Congress numerous times, is also broadly popular; 65% of US voters—including 78% of Democrats, 71% of Independents, and 49% of Republicans—support creating a national, government-run healthcare program, according to a Data for Progress poll last year.

Despite this, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers continue to insist the proposal is unpopular and too expensive, with Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D-8), who is running against vehement Medicare for All advocate Abdul El-Sayed in the Democratic US Senate primary, insisting recently that “the support for a true single-payer system isn’t there yet.”

Reginald Williams II, senior vice president at Commonwealth Fund, emphasized that it is “not inevitable” that “Americans pay more for healthcare and get less in return.”

“It’s the result of different choices,” he said. “Other countries have shown that alternatives work. What’s striking isn’t the absence of solutions; it’s our reluctance to implement them. The failure of the US health system is not a failure of ideas. It’s a failure of will to act on them.”

Universal Health Care Once Seemed on the Horizon in California. What Happened?

Among California’s top five gubernatorial candidates, only one unequivocally supports state-based single-payer.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

May 28, 2026

Source: TruthOut

Universal Health Care july 2018 by Mirarkitty is licensed under BY-SA 4.0 / wikimedia

Fighting for Our Lives: The Movement for Medicare for All

California voters are in the thick of a high-stakes governor’s race, in which single-payer health care, an issue that was once central to state politics, has been pushed to the sidelines. Of the top five candidates, only one unequivocally supports a health care model that would finally put California on par with the rest of the industrialized world.

Billionaire Tom Steyer, running as a Democrat, says single-payer is the only way to bring down spiraling health care costs. In 2020, Steyer ran for president on a platform touting a “public option,” and attacking Senator Bernie Sanders’s single-payer health care plan. Now, Steyer has reversed that position, earning the coveted endorsement of the California Nurses Association, one of the state’s most aggressive proponents of single-payer.

Sanders is widely credited with popularizing single-payer or “Medicare for All,” which would make health care a freely available and publicly funded resource much like public schools or libraries. In the face of federal intransigence, single-payer proponents have advocated for states to enact their own programs. Indeed, California has come close to enacting “CalCare,” its own version of single-payer, several times in recent years.

Steyer’s opponent and fellow Democrat Katie Porter has also said she supports single-payer but worries about its feasibility. In a public forum hosted by Politico last year, she said, “I don’t think it’s realistic in the next couple of years for the state to push forward on that,” adding that she believed it was more appropriate for the federal government to take it on instead.

Meanwhile, the current frontrunner, Xavier Becerra, has backed away from supporting single-payer. Becerra, who won the endorsement of a powerful, anti-single-payer lobby group called the California Medical Association, is running on a platform of preserving the status quo.

Meanwhile, the two Republicans polling well enough to potentially win a spot on the November ballot in California’s “free-for-all” primary are Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco. Hilton, a former Fox News host, and Bianco, who is Southern California’s Riverside County Sheriff, are both running on reducing access to state-funded health care, primarily for undocumented immigrants.

At a time when the cost of living in California continues to skyrocket, single-payer health care has been oddly low on the list of candidates’ talking points. Dr. Paul Song, a member of Physicians for a National Health Program and former co-chair of the Campaign for a Healthy California, said there’s good reason for that.

“The number of uninsured as a percent of our California population is at the lowest it’s been in a long time,” Song said in an interview on Rising Up With Sonali. That’s because Governor Gavin Newsom recently oversaw the expansion of insurance coverage to most Californians.

In 2018, then-candidate Newsom won the California Nurses Association’s endorsement for embracing single-payer. But his support for a system that would cover 100 percent of the population over time morphed into what he now calls “universal access to health care coverage.” While it might sound a lot like universal health care, this shift is a sleight of hand. Newsom’s chosen policy merely means almost everyone in the state has some form of private or public health insurance — but it doesn’t address the rising costs of premiums, co-pays, and high out-of-pocket charges.

“It’s easy to have become discouraged based on the false promises of Gavin Newsom when he ran and said he was going to run as a single-payer candidate,” said Song. Since 2018 there have been “numerous attempts where activists have tried to advance legislation only to see it just killed in Sacramento and not even be brought up for a vote,” he added.

Newsom has been accused of deliberately “slow-rolling” single-payer as governor. Song recalled a 2020 incident in which the governor caused a scandal by attending a dinner party at a high-end restaurant during the state’s strict COVID lockdown. “The person he was having dinner with was Dustin Corcoran from the CMA, the California Medical Association, who was one of the largest opponents of our single-payer system,” said Song. It’s the same organization that has backed Becerra for governor, a candidate who only recently surged in the polls after Congressional Rep. Eric Swalwell dropped out of the race.

Angered by Newsom’s backtracking, the California Nurses Association lambasted him in 2023 over his signing of SB 770, a bill that undercut single-payer efforts by expanding health coverage through private insurers. The union called it “a complete betrayal of nurses’ fight for a single-payer health care policy, a fight striving to achieve health justice for our patients and our communities.”

California Nurses Association President Michelle Gutierrez Vo, an adult family medicine nurse at Kaiser Fremont, explained why the union now supports Steyer in an emailed statement. “As a frontline nurse who cares for patients, I know Californians want a governor who supports CalCare.” According to Vo, her organization backs Steyer because he, “understands that we need to take on deep-rooted systematic failures in Sacramento, and that we cannot allow the next governor to repeat the political opportunism that has dominated this issue for too long.”

Song took a dim view of Becerra, saying, “There have been times where he said he was in favor of [single-payer], but you never saw him actively trying to propose anything to make that possible.” Becerra, who made history as the federal government’s first Latino Secretary of Health and Human Services during President Joe Biden’s administration, faced pressure from single-payer advocates to protect Medicare from privatization. According to Song, “What I saw under his watch was the even greater privatization of our health care system.”

Perhaps the largest reason why single-payer is no longer a key issue in the governor’s race is the supposed price tag of government funding for health care. Estimates range from more than $400 billion to $731 billion per year. Given that the state’s projected 2027 budget is on the order of $349 billion annually, single-payer opponents are quick to claim the state simply can’t afford it.

But Song says such estimates don’t account for the savings from switching to single-payer. “If you look at the total number of dollars that are spent on health care, and not to mention the amount of money that comes out of our pocket for co-pays or deductibles, or because we have an employee-sponsored plan, the number of dollars that we don’t get in our salary because the company has to deduct that to pay for health care, we are paying essentially for a universal health care system or a single-payer system, we just are not getting one,” he said.

Many studies have shown that single-payer would garner net savings for individuals. The trouble is that in order to enact it at the state level, state governments need permission from the federal government to divert Medicare and Medicaid funds toward a single-payer system — a request that is highly unlikely to be granted under the Trump administration. Newsom did not attempt to obtain a federal waiver under the Biden administration, although even if he had he would have been unlikely to succeed given that the Democratic president was also an opponent of single-payer.

Ironically, in 2017, Newsom declared on the social media platform X, “I’m tired of politicians saying they support single payer but that it’s too soon, too expensive or someone else’s problem.” Within a few years, he had become precisely such a politician.

Worse, Newsom’s touted substitute for single-payer — “universal access to healthcare coverage” — is about to come apart at the seams. In October 2025, his administration warned that health care costs were about to double thanks to congressional inaction, with insurance premiums for state insurance exchange plans potentially jumping by a whopping 97 percent. To make matters worse, Newsom just released a state budget that includes cuts to immigrants’ health care coverage — the same funding that helped achieve the near-universal health coverage of which he previously boasted.

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This article was originally published by TruthOut; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email

Sonali Kolhatkar

Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

The VA Is a Model for Public Health Care. We Need to Protect It.

By Suzanne Gordon

May 26, 2026

Source: Barn Raiser

Image by Tony Webster/Wikimediacommons, licensed via CC BY 2.0

Bruce Carruthers is a Vietnam veteran who served in the Army and now lives in Waynesville, North Carolina. At age 81, Carruthers could be spending more of his time with his three sons and grandchildren, traveling or focusing on the woodworking projects that he enjoys. Instead, for the last six years, he’s devoted hours each week to stop efforts to privatize the nation’s largest and only publicly funded health care system, run by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

Carruthers has a long and deep connection to the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). For 30 years, from 1974 to 2002, he worked first in VHA’s Human Resources department and then in hospital administration at hospitals like the Rocky Mountain Regional VA Medical Center in Denver, Colorado.

Several years after his retirement, he became a VHA patient. He now drives 36 miles from his home to the Charles George VA Medical Center in Asheville, North Carolina, where, most recently, he’s received treatment for prostate cancer (most likely as result of his exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam).

“I feel I’ve gotten not only excellent but incredibly responsive care at the VA,” he says. “One of the great things about it is if I have a question, I can email my primary care provider and get a response within hours. If I need one, they make an appointment for me.”

Several weeks ago, Carruthers noticed a bluish-purple mole on his neck and wrote his physician. The doctor responded immediately with a referral to a dermatologist, who quickly booked an appointment with Carruthers. “This would never happen in the private sector, at least not in rural America. I would have had to wait months to see a dermatologist in my area of the country.” 

Like so many other veterans, he values a health care system designed specifically to meet the needs of veterans. Carruthers serves as President of the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI), a think tank that focuses on stopping VA privatization. He’s also a steering committee member of the Veterans For Peace Save Our VA Campaign (SOVA), which has the same goal.

“At 81, my time on this planet is obviously limited,” he says. “But I’m dedicated to making sure veterans, especially younger vets, receive the same kind of excellent care I’ve received at the VA.”

Over the past decade, a right-wing attack on the VHA has jeopardized the continued availability of this kind of care. Today, efforts to privatize the VA now threaten the very existence of the nation’s largest health care system. (Read my previous coverage on this issue for Barn Raiser here and here.)

In this first article of a multi-part series with Barn Raiser, I want to explain just what the VHA is and what it does, not only for rural veterans but all Americans. Subsequent articles will then describe the forces who have launched this assault against the VA, how veterans and rural Americans are organizing to protect the VA, and what you can do to protect this one-of-a-kind system.

The VHA is in fact, become the nation’s only socialized medicine system—albeit one that serves a small slice of the American population. Like the United Kingdom or Scandinavian health care systems, the government owns and operates all VA health care facilities, and all VA employees are on salary. VA physicians are not paid on a fee-for-service basis but are salaried and thus have no incentive to overtreat patients because they benefit financially from delivering unnecessary treatments or procedures. For example, studies have shown that the VA is the only health care system that follows standard of care for patients with low-risk prostate cancer, which is watchful waiting. Outside of VA, men with low-risk prostate cancer are far more likely to receive unnecessary surgery or invasive radiation treatment.

Although the VA is not a classic single-payer system, it is a national health system that both pays for and provides care, which makes it far easier to innovate within the system. VA innovations are legion, including medication barcoding, the integration of mental health and primary care, and widespread use of geriatric care for VA’s many older patients. As health care reform advocates search for models of high quality, accessible and affordable health care, they don’t have to look to Canada or the U.K. or other European countries, they can find it in every state in the nation.

The nation’s only genuine health care system

Since 1811, when Congress directed the Navy to establish the Naval Home in Philadelphia, the United States has offered former service members health care services to deal with their military related injuries.

A month before the Civil War ended, on March 3, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln helped lay the foundation of what would become the Veteran’s Administration when he signed a law creating the National Asylum for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers to serve Union veterans. A day later, in his second Inaugural address, Lincoln famously pledged this care as both a literal and metaphorical means of healing the nation:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

By World War I, a variety of government agencies managed veterans’ health care and benefits. In 1930, President Herbert Hoover consolidated administration of veterans’ affairs into a single federal agency, the Veterans Administration. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan made that agency a cabinet level department, renaming it the Department of Veterans Affairs—still referred to as the VA. The Department includes the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) and Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA), which run the nation’s largest health care and benefits systems.

In 1994, the VA, still reeling from its failures to adequately care for veterans who suffered during the Vietnam War (as revealed in Ron Kovic’s 1976 memoir Born on the Fourth of July, later adapted as a movie in 1989 starring Tom Cruise) got a top to bottom makeover under the leadership of its new Under Secretary for Health Kenneth W. Kizer. Kizer, in what is known as the “Kizer revolution,” transformed a system that largely delivered hospital care of variable quality into the nation’s only comprehensive, fully integrated health care system.

While many largely market driven, increasingly corporate owned hospitals and clinics call themselves “health care systems,” they largely deliver fragmented medical treatment based on a fee-for-service, pay-as-you-go system. These “health care systems” are notorious for skimping on mental health care, and almost totally ignore social determinants of health like lack of housing, employment, occupational health and safety issues or legal problems. The VHA addresses all of these issues and more.

One common misconception about the VA is that anyone who has served in the military can access its health care system and benefits. That’s not true. Eligibility depends on a service member’s discharge status, their income, or their time in a combat zone, in our post-9/11 conflicts or whether they have a proven service-connected disability. More than half of America’s 17 million veterans probably qualify for VA health care; however, the system currently serves only nine million. An estimated 2.7 million, or about one third, of enrolled veterans live in rural areas.

The VA not only provides these veterans with a wide range of medical services—everything from primary care, to surgery, to geriatric care—it also has extensive mental and behavioral health programs. Major VA medical centers almost always include a full-service nursing home and residential rehabilitation treatment programs. The VA also has Blind Rehabilitation, Spinal Cord Injury and Polytrauma Treatment programs for veterans with serious vision loss, spinal cord injuries or who have suffered multiple traumatic injuries. The VA also addresses veteran homelessness, and employment and legal problems.

In 2014, the American Journal of Public Health lauded the VHA for its serious commitment, and action to achieve, health care equity, which it defines as providing timely, high quality, personalized, safe and effective health care regardless of geography, gender, race, age, culture or sexual orientation. This commitment to equity has supported rural veterans in particular, with the VA targeting programs and research initiatives focused on solving rural health disparities.

When it comes to serving rural veterans, who comprise about 25% of the total veteran population, the VA has made a serious and sustained commitment to meet their needs. VA has established almost 788 Community Based Outpatient Clinics (CBOCs) throughout the country, which means that most are within driving distance of a VA facility. Although some veterans who live in remote rural areas have to drive farther, most rural veterans are within a 44.5 mile range of a VA clinic. 

Veterans benefit not only from a network of rural VHA clinics but also from well-established pathways to VHA facilities in metropolitan areas where they can receive more specialized care. In the cases of truly long travel, the VA often helps defray transportation and lodging costs and ensures coordination of care once veterans return to their local communities. A system of Fisher Houses also provides lodging for family members of veterans getting longer term treatment. In 2006, Congress also mandated that VHA create an an Office of Rural Health to study the needs and obstacles to access of rural veterans. The ORH also has developed regional Veterans Rural Health Resource Centers to delve more deeply into how to address the health care challenges of rural veterans.

VHA’s other missions include teaching, research and emergency preparedness. The VHA’s more than 12,000 hospitals and clinics are a key training ground for many of the nation’s future doctors, nurses and other clinicians. More than 1,800, or nearly 90%, of educational institutions partner with the VHA in this $900 million-a-year program. More than 70% of the nation’s physicians have received training in the VHA.

The VA also trains many other kinds of health care professionals. It’s the single largest employer of psychologists in the United States. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), “one in five doctoral interns in psychology is training at the VA. VA also hosts more than 50 percent of APA-accredited postdoctoral training programs in psychology.”  In 2022, the American Association of Medical Colleges told Congress that the VHA played a role in medical education, training and research that is “irreplaceable.”

The VHA is also the nation’s largest research institution. Only the National Institutes of Health funds more research than the VHA. The VHA developed barcoding for medication administration, the first implantable cardiac pacemaker, the nicotine patch and the first Shingles vaccine. It has assembled the largest collection of brain tissue in the world in its Biorepository Brain Bank, established the connection between concussions in football and later development of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, and its Million Veteran Program has assembled the largest genomic data bank in the world, allowing more than 600 researchers across VHA’s 80-plus projects to better understand and treat anxiety, heart disease, kidney disease, cancer, Parkinson’s Disease and other ailments.

The VHA is also mandated to address veteran homelessness. Its pioneering homeless programs, which include prevention services (Supportive Services for Veteran Families), outreach services (Health Care for Homeless Veterans and the National Call Center for Homeless Veterans), temporary housing and permanent housing services (Supportive Services for Veteran Families), have helped significantly reduce veteran homelessness as well as create models that have been emulated across the country to reduce a growing national epidemic. According to data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, veteran homelessness hit a record low in January 2024 since measurement began in 2009.

Finally, the VHA serves as backup to the civilian health care system in times of war, terrorist attacks, natural disasters and other emergencies—from pandemics and mass shootings to hurricanes, tornados and wildfires. The VHA’s medical center in Puerto Rico, for instance, was the only functioning hospital on the island during and after Hurricane Maria. And it was open to non-veterans. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, VHA facilities cared for non-veteran patients in hot spots like New York, New Jersey and Louisiana. The VHA also has a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Defense to serve as a backup in times of war or terrorist attack.

Study after study has confirmed that the care VHA delivers to veterans not only equal to but very often superior to the care delivered by the private sector. Surveys of veterans also document that veterans highly approve of their dedicated health care system and want to see it improved and even expanded.

Unfortunately, neither the messages veterans are sending or those published in prestigious scientific journals have convinced Republican—and even too many Democratic—lawmakers to fully fund and staff the VHA. Over the past decade, a powerful movement funded by billionaire industrialists like the Koch Brothers and other dark money allies like Elon Musk—supported by the hospital, medical equipment and pharmaceutical industries—have launched a movement to privatize the VHA and even attack the benefits administered by the VBA.

Should this movement succeed, it will create serious problems not only for veterans but for all Americans. As I will explain in the next article, it will exacerbate an already catastrophic shortage of health care in rural America.

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