Follow the Money
The thesis of this site is simple: the check comes, and the care takes a fight. This page is about the check. What follows is what the Department of Veterans Affairs pays — per day, per program, per building — for a veteran's last days, taken from the VA's own budget books, from the Government Accountability Office, and from the federal contract record. Every figure on this page carries its source. Nothing here is estimated silently, and nothing is rounded into a lie: where a number is an estimate, it is labeled one, with its method shown.
The three pipes
VA nursing-home care flows through three pipes, and the pipes do not cost the same.
- The VA’s own nursing homes — the Community Living Centers (CLCs) attached to VA medical centers: $2,062.01 per veteran per day (FY2025 actual, VA FY2027 Budget Submission, Vol. 2).
- Contract community nursing homes — private facilities paid by the VA to house veterans: $499.19 per veteran per day (same table).
- State veterans homes — run by the states, part-paid by a federal per diem: $330.24 per veteran per day, the federal share only (same table).
Read the first line again. The government’s own building costs four times what the government pays a private facility for the same bed — $2,062.01 against $499.19, a ratio of 4.1 to 1 out of the VA’s own budget submission (VA FY2027 Budget Submission, Vol. 2, Institutional Per Diem table).
The CLC program as a whole obligates $5.714 billion in FY2025 (VA FY2027 Budget Submission, Vol. 2) across 134 Community Living Centers (VA, National Planning Strategy – Community Living Centers). What any single one of those 134 homes spends is not published — not in the budget justification, not in any public dataset. The VA publishes each home’s quality ratings. It does not publish each home’s budget. The facility-level figures exist inside the VA’s internal cost-accounting system, and a FOIA request for them — station-level CLC cost reports, FY2023–FY2025 — has been scoped for this site.
The whole bill
FY2025 actual obligations, from the VA’s own Long-Term Services & Supports tables (VA FY2027 Budget Submission, Vol. 2):
| Setting | FY2025 | Average daily census |
|---|---|---|
| VA Community Living Centers | $5,714,002,000 | 7,592 |
| Community nursing homes (contract) | $2,731,039,000 | 14,989 |
| State veterans homes — nursing (federal share) | $2,010,111,000 | 16,676 |
| State home domiciliary (federal share) | $52,731,000 | 2,149 |
| Institutional total | $10,507,883,000 | 41,406 |
Total long-term services and supports, institutional and home-based together: $19,564,546,000 in FY2025 (same source).
An independent cross-check, one year earlier: in FY2023 the VA spent almost $8.4 billion for approximately 36,000 veterans in institutional nursing care across all three settings, of which about $1.5 billion went to state veterans homes for almost 15,000 veterans (GAO-25-108441, testimony, April 29, 2025).
And the money that cannot be accounted for at all: the VA’s purchased long-term services reported $347.41 million in improper and unknown payments in FY2025 (VA FY2027 Budget Submission, Vol. 2) — down from $760.09 million the year before, printed in the VA’s own volume without explanation of where it went.
One home: Bennett
The Emory L. Bennett Veterans Nursing Home in Daytona Beach, Florida — the home where Thomas Alan Bowman Sr. lies dying, still waiting for the VA to answer his son’s letters — is run by the Florida Department of Veterans’ Affairs (FDVA). It has 120 beds (FDVA Annual Report FY2021-22; CMS provider data).
The VA pays Florida for every veteran in that building, every day, at one of two rates (VA State Home Per Diem Program, prevailing-rate table):
- Prevailing rate — $520.16 per day in FY2026, $536.81 per day in FY2027 — for a veteran with a service-connected disability rated 70% or higher. A veteran rated 100% service-connected sits squarely in this category. The resident pays nothing.
- Basic per diem — $146.98 per day (FY2026) — for other eligible veterans.
ESTIMATE — Bennett’s annual VA revenue is on the order of $10 million a year (defensible range ≈ $9.5 million to $13 million). Method, in one line: the two VA rates above, blended across the share of resident-days paid at each — calibrated against FDVA’s own system-wide VA receipts — multiplied by Bennett’s documented census of roughly 114–120 residents, 365 days a year. The theoretical ceiling, every bed at the prevailing rate at full census, is $23,512,278 a year. The VA publishes no facility-level paid figure — the state files its claims in aggregate — so until the payment records are produced, this number travels as what it is: an estimate with its inputs shown.
The frame around the building: Florida’s Veterans’ Homes program is appropriated $186,133,384 for FY2026-27 — 77% of the entire FDVA budget (OPPAGA program summary, from Transparency Florida). In FDVA’s last published annual report, VA per diem supplied $45,869,027 of the homes program’s $82,978,225 in revenue — 55 cents of every dollar (FDVA Annual Report FY2021-22).
Bennett also files Medicare cost reports, and they are public: reported total charges of $17,269,301 in 2025, and a FY2023 cost report showing net income from services of $1,753,454 (CMS HCRIS data). A nursing home for dying veterans, running a surplus of $1.75 million on its services line.
A 100%-rated Navy veteran lies dying in that home, still waiting for the VA to answer a letter. The per diem has never missed a day.
The contract trail
Community nursing homes are not paid through the VA’s big claims networks. They hold direct five-year IDIQ contracts with the VA’s regional networks — firm-fixed-price, with the daily rate set as a percentage of Medicare PDPM payments (AHCA/NCAL summaries of VA’s FY2026 fee schedule and contract terms). The per diem is a bundle: room, nursing, a share of medications and supplies, laboratory, and one provider visit a month. Therapy unbundles only after day 100.
Because those contracts sit in the federal contract record, their money is public — facility by facility, year by year. One worked example, verified in FPDS: Blue Ridge SNF Operations LLC (Blue Ridge Therapy Connection, Virginia), all of whose federal awards are VA community-nursing-home contracts — $15,619,996 in VA obligations across FY2023–FY2025, including base-year orders of exactly $2,440,800, renewed at exactly $2,440,800. (These are FPDS obligations — money the VA committed — not a claims-paid ledger; the pages built from this data will say so.)
The verdict of this research, stated plainly:
- Contract nursing homes: buildable. Per-facility VA money can be assembled from public contract data today, no FOIA required.
- State veterans homes: buildable — the Bennett method above, per diem rates against state books and cost reports.
- The VA’s own 134 nursing homes: FOIA-only. No per-facility budget is published anywhere.
- Rehab clinics and purchased hospice: FOIA-only. Their money moves as claims inside the community-care networks, where only the auditors ever see the aggregates.
And one absence worth printing on its own line: there is no published total for what the VA spends on hospice. The budget book shows home hospice — $194,289,000 in FY2025 (VA FY2027 Budget Submission, Vol. 2). Inpatient hospice is folded into the CLC line and into community care, unnamed. The money spent on veterans while they die has no number the public can read.
The fraud economy, documented
This page follows what the VA pays for care. The wider economy around that money — the schemes, the prosecutions, the middlemen’s margins across the whole system — is documented by our sister publication: AllegedFraud.com’s VA Fraud investigation. They document the money. This site names the office that answers for it.
What happens next
This page is the summary. The build now underway takes it facility by facility: every contract nursing home and every state veterans home in the VA’s system, with its VA dollars printed beside its oversight record — what the home is paid, next to what the inspectors found there. The FOIA for the one pipe the VA keeps dark — the per-facility budgets of its own 134 nursing homes — has been scoped and will be filed from this desk.
The check comes. Now it is itemized.