200,000 Veterans Enrolled in VA Care This Year. The Ones Who Did Not Are Still the Whole Problem.
By Shawn Cosner | June 26, 2026 | Veteran News
The Department of Veterans Affairs announced that more than two hundred thousand veterans have newly enrolled in VA health care so far in 2026, and that thirty eight new health care clinics have opened since January of 2025. Those are real numbers and they represent real people who now have a place to go.
We want to sit with the other side of that figure for a moment, because it is the side that matters most to the work we do here.
Roughly nine million veterans nationally are eligible for VA health care and not enrolled in it. Sixty percent of veterans who die by suicide had no contact with VA health care in the two years before their death. Put those two facts next to each other and the shape of the problem gets very clear. The single most consequential thing that can happen to an unenrolled veteran is not a new program. It is enrollment itself.
Enrollment is not a claim. This is a distinction that gets lost constantly, and it costs people. Filing a disability claim is a legal process with rules about who may represent you and who may charge you. Enrolling in VA health care is a form. It is the 10-10EZ. It does not require a lawyer, it does not require an accredited representative, and nobody is permitted to charge you a fee to help you fill it out. A veteran can complete it online, by phone, by mail, or in person.
What enrollment gets you is a door that stays open. Primary care. Mental health care. A record that exists. A phone number that answers. For a veteran in Preston, Monongalia, Marion, Harrison, Taylor, Wood counties and surrounding areas who has been outside the system for twenty years and assumes the door closed behind them, that assumption is usually wrong.
The reasons veterans stay unenrolled are rarely about paperwork. They are about a belief that someone else needs it more. They are about a bad experience in 1994 that never got revisited. They are about not wanting to be counted as someone who needs help. We hear all three regularly, and none of them are unreasonable feelings. They are also not good reasons to stay outside a system you earned your way into.
If you know a veteran who is not enrolled, that is the conversation worth having this month. Not a lecture about their health. Just a question about whether they ever signed up, and an offer to sit with them while they do.
The Veterans Crisis Line is available at all hours. Dial 988 and press 1. Enrollment status does not matter and never has.
