Last week was National Invest in Veterans Week, a holiday established in 2019 that seeks to honor and celebrate veterans’ service and encourage investment in their small businesses here at home. While not every state recognizes the budding observance, it’s certainly more established and worthwhile than some of the other weird, quirky holidays we love to talk about. However, its youth and good intentions doesn’t mean we can’t use it to highlight some glaring racial disparities in our society.
Earlier in his term, President Biden signed a bill into law requiring the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to study racial disparities in how the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) distributes benefits. The bill’s sponsors cited stories from constituents and advocacy of groups like the Black Veterans Project as major catalysts for the legislation. The report is due to the White House and Congress next year.
For the most part, you can probably guess what it will say.
Disparities in VA benefits are well-documented. Early last year, the U.S. National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health published a report detailing the pervasiveness of VA-related disparities. The investigation found that minority veterans reported more combat exposure, persisting health conditions, and lower overall fitness than their white counterparts. Additionally, white veterans reported greater access to prescription medications from the VA than both Black and Hispanic servicemembers. A 2017 study similarly found that white veterans reported an almost 80% satisfaction with their VA services, while only 11.1% and 5.8% of Black and Hispanic servicemembers reported the same, respectively.
All of this is to say that veteran’s health is not one-size-fits-all. Differences in service experience, upbringing, and underlying health conditions create different levels of necessary care. This is what the upcoming GAO study will reveal. In fact, the GAO has already done so.
In 2019, the GAO published its findings that the VA can do more to identify and address racial disparities. At the time of the study, the department lacked any real infrastructure or capability to report or solve racial disparities in their benefits. The VA couldn’t tell what from their information was self-reported versus what was observed by their staff. This inability, alongside missing data, led the GAO to conclude that the VA cannot ensure the accuracy of race-related information in their record.
Most damming of all, the GAO concluded that healthcare disparities in the context of the VA matched those of our country at large. The issue isn’t that the VA is worse on average than our broader healthcare system. Rather, the issue is that an arm of our government, which is a direct extension of the electorate, is just a mirror of other inequities. The opposite should be true if anything.
A government doesn’t need to use the “bottom line” as a flimsy excuse for poorer care. Instead, it should embrace its mission of serving its constituents and above all else, helping people. But when a governmental agency is so laden with inequality that we don’t even have sufficient data to analyze it, the root problem reveals itself: Our country perpetuates ignorance about racial disparities rather than truth.
