A Billionaire Tries Again to Hijack Veterans’ Care
If there’s one thing hedge fund titan Steven Cohen is known for, it’s rising from the ashes. A decade ago, Cohen worked feverishly to recover from a notorious Wall Street scandal. Now, he’s aiming to ram through a damaging veterans mental health bill that was summarily quashed in President Trump’s first term.
One of the world’s richest people, Cohen suffered a devastating blow in 2013 when his hedge fund pleaded guilty to insider trading and paid $1.8 billion in fines, the largest such penalty in U.S. history. Cohen personally reached a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission that banned him from managing outside money for two years. The SEC cited his “failure to supervise” a portfolio manager involved in the scheme who went to prison for nine years. Following his mandatory hiatus, Cohen returned with a vengeance, swiftly doubling his fortune to $23 billion.
More from Russell Lemle | Jasper Craven
In 2016, Cohen launched a philanthropic project. Drawing on his Marine son’s deployment to Afghanistan, he founded the Cohen Veterans Network (CVN)—a chain of outpatient clinics delivering comprehensive, evidence-based mental health treatment to post-9/11 veterans, service members, and their families. He initially committed $275 million of his own money, offering free care for those who lacked the means to pay for it.
Veterans advocates were deeply skeptical. Rick Weidman, then the executive director of Policy and Government Affairs at Vietnam Veterans of America, concluded, “This guy was in hot water … And suddenly he thinks, ‘Okay let me figure out what to do to up my image,’ and he starts the Cohen Veterans Network.”
The VA’s “community care” privatization program was then ramping up, with the department increasingly purchasing private care when veterans faced clinical delays or significant travel times. Most private providers were content with the established outsourcing guidelines. But not Cohen. He wanted to serve as a larger player in the veterans treatment landscape.
In 2017, CVN testified to the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee (HVAC) that it intended to be an “alternative” to the VA. At the same time, CVN set up its facilities conspicuously close to VA locations. In fact, every one of Cohen’s 22 clinics operates within 15 miles of a VA medical center or clinic.
This means that on distance criteria alone, CVN facilities are too close to qualify for VA referrals. So, to boost patient volume and revenue, Cohen fought to overturn the criteria for how veterans qualified for care in the community, targeting the prior authorization requirement for private mental health care. Under a bill he floated in 2017, veterans could simply walk into clinics without any referral, and the VA would foot the bill—no questions asked.
As Cohen pursued these legislative changes, he contributed millions to Republican congressional coffers. In 2017, he funneled a combined $3 million to the leading GOP campaign super PACs, the Senate Leadership Fund and the Congressional Leadership Fund, ranking him as the top individual donor to each. He also hired as a lobbyist Jeff Miller, a strong advocate for privatizing veterans’ health care and the recently retired HVAC chairman. Cohen personally dropped $360,000 on Miller’s services. In turn, Miller and his team drafted legislation eliminating the advance approval requirement. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) agreed to present the measure.
But the bill ran into fierce opposition from major veterans organizations. They recognized that it threatened not only VA mental health services, but the entire integrated health care system. As one former VA official observed soon thereafter: “If you start trying to carve into [government money in veterans’ care] to feed things like the Cohen Veterans Network, that’s actually privatization. It’s going to be death by a thousand cuts.” In the face of this strong resistance, the bill was withdrawn.
In the years that followed, Cohen appears to have largely removed himself from veterans policy issues. Recently, however, efforts to abolish the VA’s pre-authorization requirement have quietly regained steam, thanks in large part to covert efforts from Cohen and his allies.
In 2024, HVAC chairman Rep. Mike Bost (R-IL) introduced the Veterans’ Mental Health Access Act. The legislation, now rebranded as the RECOVER Act, will be taken up at an HVAC hearing along with several other pieces of legislation tomorrow.
Two major lobbying forces have emerged as champions of the RECOVER Act. The first is Centerstone, a private mental health care network that operates four Cohen clinics. Last year, the company spent at least $170,000 lobbying on various veterans issues, including the RECOVER Act and other legislation aimed at shifting funds to the private sector.
In an email, Lauren Conaboy, Centerstone’s chief lobbyist, declined to detail whether Cohen or any of his proxies had influenced her work on RECOVER. She argued, instead, that the bill would “strengthen, not replace, VA services by investing in evidence-based, accountable nonprofit providers to fill gaps in care, expand culturally competent treatment, require robust accountability through clinical outcome standards, and help ensure veterans receive the support they need when and where it is needed most.” (This language was echoed in a subsequent congressional statement endorsing RECOVER from CVN’s CEO and president Anthony Hassan, who at once acknowledged that the grant money could fortify CVN’s ambitious network and asserted that “this is not an attempt to privatize the VA, as some detractors may claim.”)
The second major lobbying force on the bill is trickier to trace. According to two sources, Cohen hired the nation’s biggest lobbying firm in terms of revenue and influence, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, to promote the bill. But unlike Cohen’s first legislative bout, where he publicly sought the VA’s partnership and openly entered his name on federal lobbying disclosures, this time Cohen has shielded his involvement. Federal lobbying data lists neither Cohen nor CVN. Instead, the Brownstein lobbyists apparently working on Cohen’s behalf register their client as “Advancing Mental Health for Military Families LLC,” a shadowy Delaware corporation founded in November 2022 with no website or substantial paper trail. Since then, it has spent more than $1.5 million lobbying on veterans issues, including efforts to build support for the RECOVER Act among Capitol Hill lawmakers and veterans organizations. One of the Brownstein lobbyists listed on the Delaware LLC’s lobbying reports, and who references CVN clinics, previously worked under Jeff Miller at HVAC. (CVN declined to answer written questions about these lobbying tactics.)
The RECOVER Act provisions accomplish exactly what Cohen wants—at great sacrifice to veterans’ health care.
First, there’s the sweetheart deal: few-strings-attached $1.5 million grants ($60 million in total over its initial three-year pilot period), with multiple awards per recipient allowed. Grantees could pocket taxpayer dollars without increasing the number of veterans served at all. These monies come on top of insurance and VA reimbursements that facilities already receive for care rendered. Dr. Harold Kudler, a former VA mental health senior executive, noted: “Given the way the RECOVER Act is currently written, a single entity with multiple sites of care could apply for several or even all of the available grant slots.”
Next, the act eradicates criteria to determine private-sector eligibility—the thrust of Cohen’s earlier unsuccessful congressional offensive. Currently, veterans’ health care is anchored on a principle enshrined in the VA MISSION Act: The VA serves as authorizer and overseer of veterans services. When the VA can’t provide quick or convenient care, veterans qualify for health care through the Veterans Community Care Program (VCCP), the external provider network. The RECOVER Act completely circumvents this approach, allowing veterans to bypass the VA altogether for unlimited VA-subsidized mental health care from grant entities. This creates a parallel care system operating outside of, and disjointed from, both the VA and VCCP. Even the sharing of health records, central to care coordination, would be eliminated.
Equally troubling, the RECOVER Act establishes grossly inadequate quality and training standards. While the legislation claims to ensure “culturally competent, evidence-based care,” grantees face no requirement that any provider be trained in evidence-based practices. Only one staff member must receive training in military cultural competency. Suicide prevention training isn’t required either—a glaring omission given that the bill explicitly prioritizes awarding grants in areas with high numbers of at-risk veterans. In sharp contrast, VA clinicians have specialized expertise in military-specific conditions like PTSD and traumatic brain injury, and complete mandatory suicide prevention training annually.
Grant recipients have no obligation to obtain accreditation from the Joint Commission or the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities—standards that VA facilities must meet. There’s also no mandate for semiannual peer review, evaluations that are integral to quality assurance of the VA’s mental health care. There are no standards for timeliness of service, meaning grantees’ wait times could exceed the VA’s or VCCP’s. Symptom improvement is not reported.
This legislation sets a dangerous precedent, with veterans’ mental health services serving as a trial run for broader privatization of veteran health care. A parallel system with negligible oversight and few standards is not what most veterans want. But it may be what they get, and combined with last December’s massacre of VA clinical positions, the headlong rush to obliterate the public system would accelerate.
No markup has been scheduled for the RECOVER Act as of yet. But with Republicans talking about another party-line reconciliation package specifically focused on health care, this bill is precisely the kind of gift to ultra-wealthy individuals that gets stuck into such a package at the last minute.
The post A Billionaire Tries Again to Hijack Veterans’ Care appeared first on The American Prospect.