The Battle for Veterans' Healthcare

In The Battle for Veterans' Healthcare, award-winning author Suzanne Gordon takes us to the front lines of federal policymaking and healthcare delivery, as it affects eight million Americans whose military service makes them eligible for Veterans Health Administration (VHA) coverage.

Gordon's collected dispatches provide insight and information too often missing from mainstream media reporting on the VHA and from Capitol Hill debates about its future. Drawing on interviews with veterans and their families, VHA staff and administrators, health care policy experts and Congressional decision makers, Gordon describes a federal agency under siege that nevertheless accomplishes its difficult mission of serving men and women injured, in myriad ways, while on active duty.

The Battle for Veterans' Healthcare is an essential primer on VHA care and a call to action by veterans, their advocacy organizations, and political allies. Without lobbying efforts and broader public understanding of what's at stake, a system now functioning far better than most private hospital systems may end up looking more like them, to the detriment of patients and providers alike.

Suzanne Gordon is coeditor of the Cornell University Press series The Culture and Politics of Health Care Work and was program leader of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded Nurse Manager in Action Program. She is the author of Nursing against the Odds and The Battle for Veterans' Healthcare; coauthor of From Silence to Voice, Life Support, Safety in Numbers, Beyond the Checklist, and Bedside Manners; editor of When Chicken Soup Isn't Enough; and coeditor of The Complexities of Care, First, Do Less Harm, and Collaborative Caring, all from Cornell.