Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute

Policy research institute · VHPI — veterans, clinicians, and policy researchers

The policy layer: research and analysis on VA healthcare, privatization, and what community-care expansion actually does to the system veterans use. HadIt’s founder serves on its advisory board.

Why we carry them. When a fight on the ground traces back to a policy decision, VHPI is where the decision is documented.

Start here — their essential work

• The VA Privatization Playbook: Two Decades of Denial — VHPI’s flagship report by Russell Lemle and Suzanne Gordon: two decades of how VA care was steered to private providers, and what it cost the system veterans use.
• VHPI Releases Comprehensive National Analysis on Private Care Gaps (2025-08-11) — Announces “Veterans’ Health Care Choice: Myth or Reality?”, a 50-state analysis documenting how thin private-sector capacity really is for the 9 million veterans enrolled with VHA.
• VA’s Private Health Plan Faces Huge Cost Overruns — Community-care spending quadrupled from $8 billion to $31 billion in a decade, while studies show the private care is slower and lower quality than VA’s.
• Veterans Are Dying Because There’s No Regulation of Community Care (2023-12-09) — Study after study shows higher mortality in community care than in VA hospitals — and neither Congress nor VA will impose VA’s quality standards on contract providers.
• New Paper Shows How VA Privatization Threatens National Security (2023-10-26) — Ryan Leone’s paper argues that hollowing out VA also dismantles the nation’s backup medical system for wars and disasters.
• Community Care Fail: Private Providers Practice Unsafe Prescription Habits (2023-10-12) — The OIG found over 80% of community-care opioid prescribers never certified they had read VA’s safety guidelines — and the network managers never checked.
• It’s Clearer Than Ever VHA Must Remain the Primary Provider of Veteran Care (2021-12-15) — The case for keeping VHA as veterans’ primary provider and fixing the flawed quality and access standards used to justify outsourcing.
• VHA Caregivers Provide Privatization Reality Check (2021-09-29) — Two surveys of VA clinicians warn that the community-care program is dysfunctional — a reality check from the people who deliver the care.

Summaries are ours. The work is theirs — we link to it, we don’t lift it. Visit Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute →