On Monday morning, The Guardian published an article by Aaron Glantz titled “’Extremely disturbing and unethical’: new rules allow VA doctors to refuse to treat Democrats, unmarried veterans.” (Link is to the original June 16 article archived in the Wayback Machine.)
The Guardian’s article claimed that the VA had changed the bylaws for its hospitals, removing “politics” and “marital status” from the list of reasons that VA medical staff can’t discriminate against patients. The article further claimed that these new VA bylaws allowed for similar discrimination in the hiring of medical staff.
A few hours after the article was published, one of my colleagues at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) e-mailed it to the rest of us.
A number of other organizations and news outlets were already starting to spread the story, and my colleagues, including my boss, MRFF’s fearless leader Mikey Weinstein, were discussing what MRFF should put out about it.
Then I read the article, after which I immediately sent my colleagues an e-mail that ended, in all caps:
“THIS NEEDS MORE RESEARCH TO MAKE SURE IT'S TRUE!”
I know this administration is doing plenty of heinous and unbelievable things to discriminate against classes of people it doesn’t like, but this just didn’t seem to be one of them.
Here, very briefly, are some of the reasons I doubted the article’s veracity:
- Each VA medical center (or VA health care system in some cases) has its own independent bylaws, approved by the medical staff at that facility. There is not, to my knowledge, any VA-wide set of bylaws. I suspected that the article’s author had obtained the bylaws of just one VA medical center or VA health care system and mistakenly thought the changes in them were VA-wide.
- There are a number of things that I’ve been closely monitoring since this administration began, and among the things that I check on a daily or near-daily basis are the VA’s and VHA’s official issuances sites, where new VA and VHA directives are posted. I had not seen any directive or other issuance from the VA or VHA directing VA facilities to change their bylaws.
- The utter ridiculousness of the notion that the VA — even in this looney-tunes administration — would think it could get away with denying care to all Democrats and unmarried veterans.
- MRFF had not received a single complaint about this from any of its VA staff clients. The only e-mails we received about it were because of The Guardian’s article.
So, MRFF, which had an e-mail blast going out that day, decided to acknowledge The Guardian’s article, since it couldn’t be ignored at this point, but with this disclaimer: “MRFF Cannot Substantiate The Guardian's Reporting. Our Research Team is Investigating the Story.”
Later that day, The Hill published an article titled “White House denies reporting by Guardian on VA benefits: ‘Totally FALSE story’.” The Hill quoted the CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, who cited the same primary reason that I had for my doubts about The Guardian’s reporting — each VA medical center and/or health care system has its own set of bylaws.
Late yesterday afternoon, The Guardian toned down its article, including changing the headline to “VA hospitals remove politics and marital status from guidelines protecting patients from discrimination.”
By this time, however, the article had been spread far and wide, even eliciting a statement on it from Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) with the heading “Trump Administration Allows VA Doctors to Deny Care to Unmarried Women and Democrats, Senator Murray Responds,” which linked to The Guardian’s article.
Enter Snopes, which has deemed five allegations in The Guardian’s article to be “False.”
After “scores of Snopes readers emailed” the trusted debunking site “to ask whether the claim was true,” Snopes looked into it, and received this statement from The Guardian:
“While we have no plans to retract the story - which highlights the VA's removal of ‘politics’ and 'marital status' from a list of protections against discrimination within its bylaws - we are considering additional context provided by the VA after publication.”
I’ll leave it to you astute readers here to compare The Guardian’s original article to its revised version, the changes to which are also detailed by Snopes.
I have taken no pleasure in writing this post. I love The Guardian and have always considered it to be among the most reliable news sources. But no matter who a story comes from, if I have any doubts about it, my MRFF colleagues will get the same message from me, the foundation’s research director:
“THIS NEEDS MORE RESEARCH TO MAKE SURE IT'S TRUE!”
