June 21, 2007
Military Veterans without Care and Insurance
Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., M.P.H., in testimony presented to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Veterans Affairs.
In 2004, 1.8 million military veterans neither had health insurance nor received ongoing care at Veterans Health Administration (VHA) hospitals. Note that the surveys asked veterans if they had health insurance, and if they had veterans or military health care. We counted them as uninsured only if they answered no to both questions. The number of uninsured veterans has increased by 290,000 since 2000. The proportion of non-elderly veterans who were uninsured rose from less then one in ten (9.9%) in 2000 to more than one in eight (12.7%) in 2004.