The Brief

Jon Henry served in Iraq during the first Gulf War, in a unit meant to counter chemical warfare attacks. Luckily for him the attacks never happened, but he still earned full veterans benefits, including a home loan backed by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Henry, who lives outside Kansas City. Mo., fell behind on his mortgage after losing his job managing a manufacturing plant last October. And because of a move last month by the VA, vets like him with delinquent loans have far worse options than most other American homeowners who never served.

"My social media posts have not been nice to the director of the VA and have not been nice to Trump," Henry said. "And I voted for the guy!"

Henry was hoping to get help from the VA Servicing Purchase program, or VASP. In just the past year, according to the VA, it has helped more than 33,000 veterans and servicemembers who got behind on their loans by giving them a new, low-interest-rate mortgage.

But last month, out of fear of the potential cost, the VA abruptly did away with this safety net. It was the latest development in a VA mortgage saga that has whiplashed veterans between various enacted and cancelled programs and left thousands in fear of losing their homes. There are about 80,000 vets in the U.S. behind on their mortgages and heading toward foreclosure, according to data from ICE Mortgage Technology.

Navy Diver Matt Kelly in Salalah, Oman circa 2010 before doing an underwater sweep of a pier to look for improvised explosive devices.

"It's like, damn, you keep talking big about how you're doing all this for the veterans, but you just turned your back on 80,000 vets that have VA loans," Henry said.

Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress are questioning this move by the VA. And NPR has heard from more than 50 veterans around the country in recent weeks who say they are upset.

"I'm constantly terrified every day that some giant moving truck or some people are just gonna show up on the front door and kick us out and start throwing all of our stuff out of the house," said Mason Reale, a former Navy sonar technician in Lake Wales, Fla.

"It's infuriating and it's devastating," Matthew Kelly, a retired Navy Special Operations diver in San Antonio, Texas, told NPR.

The VA said in a statement to NPR that it "has a long-standing history of exploring options for Veterans to retain their homes." 

But the VASP program was created as a crucial last resort to keep veterans in their homes. Current mortgage rates of around 7 percent mean the other option for a VA loan, a loan modification, often sharply raises the monthly payment, making it unaffordable. So without VASP, many veterans will have to choose between selling the house, or getting foreclosed on.

That leaves vets in a worse position than most other homeowners. Mortgages backed by the government either through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac or FHA all have emergency options for delinquent borrowers that don't raise their interest rate or monthly payment. But that's not true anymore for veterans with loans backed by the VA, now that it's closed enrollment into VASP.

When VA secretary Doug Collins appeared before a U.S. Senate committee in May, he heard about it — and mostly from Republican lawmakers.

" I was just with a press conference back home with reporters back home," Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana told Collins. "They asked me about the VA servicing purchase program or VASP."

Cassidy cited NPR's reporting and asked about the VA "leaving veterans in the lurch."

Collins stood behind the VA's decision to end VASP. "The VASP program is something that we do not need to be in," he said.

Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins testifies on Capitol Hill on May 15.

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Collins and some other Republicans don't like the way VASP works to help vets with these troubled loans — by buying them up and rolling the missed payments into a new loan with a low 2.5 percent interest rate. They worry that puts too much taxpayer money at risk since the VA holds the new loans on its own books.

At a recent house hearing, Collins said the program was going to cost "multiple billions of dollars" going forward and that "it's a program we should have never gotten into."

Collins said he's hoping Congress passes legislation to replace VASP with what's called a "partial claim" program. That takes the homeowners' missed payments and moves that debt to the end of the homeowner's loan term. Homeowners then start paying their mortgage again with their original interest rate and monthly payment.

VA used to have a partial claim option for veterans but it was suddenly shut down in late 2022 during the Biden administration. That, too, left thousands of vets with far worse options than other homeowners. After NPR reported on that misstep, the VA halted foreclosures for an entire year while it rolled out VASP to rescue vets from losing their homes. Now Trump's VA has scuttled that rescue program.

"We look forward to seeing how that legislation… the partial claim comes through," Collins told senators at last month's hearing.

But Democrats slammed Collins and the VA for basically ripping up the VASP safety net before anything has been set up to replace it.  Congressman Chris Pappas of New Hampshire said vets facing foreclosure are left just hoping Congress will act in time.

"That's not a good enough answer for my constituent," Pappas told Collins at another recent hearing. "Veterans I talked to don't agree with the abrupt ending to VASP," Pappas said.

Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.) says he's concerned about veterans facing imminent foreclosure after the abrupt cancellation of the VASP program.

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At the Senate hearing, Arkansas Republican John Boozman gently made that same point to Collins, asking what the VA can do for veterans right now, and for the unknown number of months that it may take for Congress to pass, and VA to set up, a new program.

"How does the VA plan to help veterans at risk of foreclosure?" Boozman asked. "You know it's one thing going forward, it's another thing for those individuals that are caught up in that now, and it makes it really difficult."

Asked by Pappas whether he would consider another foreclosure moratorium for vets, Collins replied: " I'm not gonna commit to a program on the fly here in the middle of the hearing. I understand your concern."

Navy Diver Matt Kelly (left) in Scuba gear on a training mission with divers from Trinidad and Tobago in 2012.<br>

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The mortgage program has been a real concern for veterans like the former Navy diver Matt Kelly. Kelly suffered a brain injury during his service. He still gets headaches, and a few years ago they stopped him from working for a while.

"I was getting terrible migraines," he said. " I thought I needed time to deal with my medical stuff. "

Kelly's mortgage company allowed him to pause payments and told him he'd have an affordable way to catch up later. Indeed, VASP would have done that. But then the VA shut it down, leaving Kelly panicked about losing his home, and not knowing where he'd go with his wife and three young kids.

When NPR first spoke to Kelly in April, he said he'd been up most of the previous night, worrying what to do.

After his Navy service, Kelly worked in a search and rescue and underwater recovery unit for Grand Canyon National Park. 

 "I shake uncontrollably," Kelly said. "My wife woke me up and said I was shaking. But right now I'm more pissed off and angry."

After NPR asked the VA and Kelly's mortgage company, Loancare, about his situation, the president of the company called NPR to say that, in Kelly's case, the company actually made some mistakes that led to Kelly not getting enrolled in VASP in time. He said Loancare will eat the cost and give Kelly a new, low-interest-rate loan with the same terms as VASP.

Thousands of other vets who are still behind on their loans haven't been so fortunate. Both Jon Henry and Mason Reale initially had trouble qualifying for VASP and now the program is closed so they won't get the help. Kelly says he's worried about other vets.

"It's a responsibility of the VA. They announced this program, then they canceled the program, and they're leaving veterans hanging," Kelly said, adding, "their mission to protect veterans and care for veterans is not being fulfilled."

Meanwhile, Congress is working on a replacement for the VA home loan safety net. One bill has passed in the House and two bills have been introduced in the Senate. But it's not clear how long the process of standing up a new VA safety net might take, or how many veterans will lose their homes in the meantime.
Copyright 2025 NPR

The Irvine City Council on Tuesday is set to vote on a land swap deal that will waive affordable housing requirements for one of the biggest developers in Orange County.

If the council approves the land swap with FivePoint, the city will give 26.4 acres of land in exchange for 35 acres dubbed the Crescent site. The city will then greenlight FivePoint’s development of 1,300 market rate housing in an area where the median price for a home is around $1.5 million.

The staff report for Tuesday’s meeting does not include land appraisals or a financial analysis of the land swap and the financial impact of waiving affordable housing requirements for FivePoint within the Great Park. LAist has requested those documents from the city and will update the story if we hear back.

However, in a staff report, officials say Irvine can use the land in the deal to build more affordable housing than would otherwise be built in the commercial market.

The breakdown of the land swap

Heritage Fields El Toro, part of the FivePoint umbrella, owns the land adjacent to the Irvine Transportation Center, a transit station that falls in the Amtrak Pacific Surfliner route, as well as Metrolink train and Orange County Transportation Authority bus routes. That 35-acre area is dubbed the “Crescent Site.” City officials want that land to build a “transit oriented development” connecting the Great Park and Irvine Spectrum areas.

According to the city, “The area is particularly well suited for higher-density residential and mixed-use formats, sidewalk-activated retail and creative commercial spaces, walkable urban blocks, and a lifestyle environment attractive to young professionals and knowledge-sector employees.”

Irvine has not included plans on how they will achieve state affordable housing requirements in the staff report.

LAist has reached out to the California Department of Housing and Community Development for comment.

Will veterans finally get a resting place in Irvine?

In the land swap, FivePoint will also give the city $15 million to use toward the construction of a columbarium for cremated remains, a new public library and other amenities on a 125-acre plot of land within Great Park — a project that may go to voters in 2026.

For years, plans to build a final resting place for veterans in Irvine has stalled due to debates over politics, a property developer, site options and ballot measures. Fed-up veterans finally took their plans to Anaheim’s Gypsum Canyon, where they received the backing of the state. Irvine Mayor Larry Agran tried to revive talks of a veterans cemetery in Irvine in May, but that was quickly shut down.

How to watchdog Great Park board meetings

One of the best things you can do to hold officials accountable is pay attention.

Your city council, board of supervisors, school board and more all hold public meetings that anybody can attend. These are times you can talk to your elected officials directly and hear about the policies they’re voting on that affect your community.

• Read tips on how to get involved.
• The next scheduled Great Park board meeting is 4 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 9. You can find meeting agendas and upcoming dates here. 
• And submit a comment on the agenda here. 

Sarah Monroe once had a relatively comfortable middle-class life.

She and her family lived in a neatly landscaped neighborhood near Cleveland. They had a six-figure income and health insurance through her job. Then, four years ago, when Monroe was pregnant with twin girls, something started to feel off.

"I kept having to come into the emergency room for fainting and other symptoms," recalled Monroe, 43, who works for an insurance company.

The babies were fine. But after months of tests and hospital trips, Monroe was diagnosed with a potentially dangerous heart condition.

It would be costly. Within a year, as she juggled a serious illness and a pair of newborns, Monroe was buried under more than $13,000 in medical debt.

Part of the reason: Like tens of millions of Americans, she had a high-deductible health plan. People with these plans typically pay thousands of dollars out of their own pockets before coverage kicks in.

The plans, which have become common over the past two decades, are getting renewed attention thanks to President Donald Trump and his GOP allies in Congress.

Many Republicans are reluctant to extend government subsidies that help cover patients' medical bills and insurance premiums through the Affordable Care Act.

And although GOP leaders have yet to coalesce around an alternative, several leading Republican lawmakers have proposed Americans who don't get insurance through an employer should get cash in a special health care account, paired with a high-deductible health plan.

In such an arrangement, someone could choose a plan on an ACA marketplace that costs less per month but comes with an annual deductible that can top $7,000 for an individual plan.

"A patient makes the decision," Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said at a recent hearing. "It empowers the patient to lower the cost."

In a post on Truth Social last month, Trump said: "The only healthcare I will support or approve is sending the money directly back to the people."

"Skin in the game"

Conservative economists and GOP lawmakers have been making similar arguments since high-deductible health plans started to catch on two decades ago.

Back then, a backlash against the limitations of HMOs, or health maintenance organizations, propelled many employers to move workers into these plans, which were supposed to empower patients and control costs. A change in tax law allowed patients in these plans to put away money in tax-free health savings accounts to cover medical bills.

"The notion was that if a consumer has 'skin in the game,' they will be more likely to seek higher-quality, lower-cost care," said Shawn Gremminger, who leads the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions, a nonprofit that works with employers that offer their workers health benefits.

"The unfortunate reality is that largely has not been the case," Gremminger said.

Today, nearly all health plans comes with a deductible, with the average for a single worker with job-based coverage approaching $1,700, up from around $300 in 2006.

Plans with deductibles that exceed $1,650 can be paired with a tax-free health savings account.

But even as deductibles became widespread over the last 20 years, medical prices in the U.S. skyrocketed. The average price of a knee replacement, for example, increased 74% from 2003 to 2016, more than double the rate of overall inflation.

At the same time, patients have been left with thousands of dollars of medical bills they can't pay, despite having health insurance.

About 100 million people in the U.S. have some form of health care debt, a 2022 survey showed.

Most, like Monroe, are insured.

Medical price shopping isn't easy

Although Monroe had a health savings account paired with her high-deductible plan, she was never able to save more than a few thousand dollars, she said. That wasn't nearly enough to cover the big bills when her twins were born and when she got really ill.

"It's impossible, I will tell you, impossible to pay medical bills," she said.

There was another problem with her high-deductible plan. Although these plans are supposed to encourage patients to shop around for medical care to find the lowest prices, Monroe found this impractical when she had a complex pregnancy and heart troubles.

Instead, Monroe chose the largest health system in her area.

"I went with that one as far as medical risk," she said. "If anything were to happen, I could then be transferred within that system."

Federal rules that require hospitals to post more of their prices can make comparing institutions easier than it used to be.

But unlike a car or a computer, most medical services remain difficult to shop for, in part because they stem from an emergency or are complex and can stretch over numerous years.

Researchers at the nonprofit Health Care Cost Institute, for example, estimated that just 7% of total health care spending for Americans with job-based coverage was for services that realistically could be shopped for.

Fumiko Chino, an oncologist at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said it makes no sense to expect patients with cancer or another chronic disease to go out and compare prices for complicated medical care such as surgeries, radiation, or chemotherapy after they've been diagnosed with a potentially deadly illness.

"You're not going be able to actually do that effectively," Chino said, "and certainly not within the time frame that you would need to when facing a cancer diagnosis and the imminent need to start treatment."

Drowning in bills

Chino said patients with high deductibles are often instead slammed with a flood of huge medical bills that lead to debt and a cascade of other problems.

She and other researchers found in a study of more than 8,000 cancer patients presented last year at the American Society of Clinical Oncology that cancer patients who had high-deductible health insurance were more likely to die than similar patients without that kind of coverage.

For her part, Monroe and her family were forced to move out of their house and into a 1,100-square-foot apartment.

She drained her savings. Her credit score sank. And her car was repossessed.

There have been other sacrifices, too. "When families get to have nice Christmases or get to go on spring break," Monroe said, hers often does not.

She is thankful that her children are healthy. And she continues to have a job. But Monroe said she can't imagine why anyone would want to double down on the high-deductible model for health care.

"We owe it to ourselves to do it a different way," she said. "We can't treat people like this."

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF.
Copyright 2025 KFF Health News

Get out your popcorn because there's more drama in the fight over the media powerhouse Warner Brothers Discovery:

Paramount Global has sweetened its offer to acquire Warner by a bunch, offering an all-cash deal valued at $108 billion to take over the parent company of HBO, Warner Bros. Studios and CNN, among other notable properties.

It would appear to significantly outstrip the deal worth $83 billion that Netflix and Warner announced just last Friday, although that agreement is solely for Warner's streaming service and studios. If that deal were to go through, CNN and other cable channels would be spun off.

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, one of the world's richest people, and his son David, the movie producer and founder of Skydance Media, took over Paramount this summer. It's the parent company of CBS, Paramount Studios, the Paramount+ streaming service and more.

Combining with Warner would let them create a Hollywood behemoth to take on Netflix, already the world's largest streamer. The Ellisons are also mindful of other major movie and TV streamers, particularly Amazon, Apple, and Disney, which bulked up a few years ago by acquiring most of Fox's entertainment assets.

The Ellisons started the ball rolling earlier this year, forcing the hand of Warner Bros. Discovery Chief Executive David Zaslav by making an unsolicited bid. He ultimately put the company on the chopping block.

In remarks on a conference call Monday with investors and reporters, Paramount executives accused Warner of "never engaging meaningfully" with its six various proposals.

Warner did not respond to a request for comment. Netflix is expected to hold a call with investors Monday afternoon.

Despite Zaslav's reluctance to sell to the Ellisons, they thought they had a dominant hand to play: they were offering a premium for the company's value on the open market and they were bidding for the entire enterprise.

What's more, they had built strong ties to President Trump, whose government regulators ultimately would have to approve any such acquisition by an already established major Hollywood player.

Larry Ellison is a donor, informal adviser and friend of the president. David Ellison has made two key hires at CBS — specifically in its news division — to ensure it will be perceived as less adversarial to Trump. A conservative former think tank chief has become its new ombudsman to review complaints. And Bari Weiss, founder of the right-of-center Free Press, has taken over the news division as editor in chief. Paramount's previous leadership had paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump against CBS News that legal observers described as flimsy.

Presidential preferences are supposed to be held at arm's length from such reviews by antitrust regulators at the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Justice Department. But that's not how Washington operates under Trump.

Even so, Trump's approval is never a sure thing. The Netflix announcement stirred instant opposition from a handful of U.S. senators in both parties. Trump was noncommittal in remarks Sunday.

"Netflix is a great company and they've done a phenomenal job," Trump said. "They have a very big market share, and when they have Warner Bros., you know, that share goes up a lot, so I don't know, that's going to be for some economists to tell and also, I'll be involved in that decision too."

However, Monday morning, Trump lashed out at CBS News for a 60 Minutes interview with Trump ally-turned-critic U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican who has announced she is stepping down. Paramount came in for particular scorn.

"My real problem with the show, however, wasn't the low IQ traitor, it was that the new ownership of 60 Minutes, Paramount, would allow a show like this to air," Trump wrote Monday morning in a post on Truth Social — after the Ellisons announced their hostile bid for Warner. "THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP, who just paid me millions of Dollars for FAKE REPORTING about your favorite President, ME! Since they bought it, 60 Minutes has actually gotten WORSE!"

Editor's note: Warner Bros. Discovery is among NPR's financial supporters.
Copyright 2025 NPR