“Privatization,” we noted two years ago, “is a classic scare-word among liberals.” We were pointing out that the Department of Veterans Affairs, after its disgraceful neglect of veterans was first revealed in a series of scandals earlier this decade, had no leg to stand on in arguing that VA patients should not be allowed to seek care from private healthcare providers.
Our frustration at the lack of reform led us to excoriate then-President Barack Obama, arguing that he was “offering veterans no way out. He won’t fix the agency which is meant to provide their benefits, and plainly intends to stop private medicine stepping into the breach to make up for its shortcomings.”
At long last, the Trump administration is finally setting the stage to give veterans the flexibility they deserve. Trump, the last Congress, and Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie deserve credit for making this happen. The only unfortunate thing is that it had to take so long.
The VA faced unusual stress when veterans began to return from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Something should have been done in the late Bush era or the early Obama era to accommodate them. One obvious answer would have been to let many or even all veterans seek VA-sponsored care from private providers, the same way Medicare patients already can and do. This makes sense because there health should be more important to the government than the health of any bureaucracy.
Instead, even as its employee union and the Obama administration resisted agency reforms, the VA bureaucracy found new and innovative ways to game the system. They slow-walked thousands of benefit applications. They manipulated computer systems to make it appear that veterans were getting care in a timely fashion so that they could collect bonuses based on their apparently good performance. VA managers kept their jobs (and, in some cases, collected bonuses) after stealing from the government, covering up infectious outbreaks at their facilities, and wasting enormous sums on decorations. One prominent VA facility in Wisconsin became a taxpayer-funded pill mill, a local epicenter of the opioid crisis.
And in case one is tempted to put too much blame for all this on the surge in veterans from the wars of the Bush era, VA doctors were also credibly accused of fraudulently logging procedures they never performed and even performing unnecessary procedures to collect performance bonuses.
It also turns out that VA facilities have a history of knowingly hiring problem doctors who go on to make life-threatening mistakes or engage in egregious misconduct. Doctors with a history of poor performance are attracted to the VA system because its physicians don’t need to carry malpractice insurance — the VA pays malpractice claims from the taxpayer’s pocket instead. (Also, think of that as one more argument against government healthcare.)
All of this raises the question: Given that the U.S. has a private healthcare system with the world’s best quality of care (affordability and payment problems aside), and given that there are other, larger government programs that already send patients for care within that broader private system, why are so many veterans being subjected to this corrupt and malicious bureaucracy in the first place? There has never been a decent answer to this question.
As the Trump administration irons out the final details, we are pleased that someone is trying to get veterans the care they need and deserve. As for the traditional VA facilities, the bureaucrats there will now be too busy competing for veterans’ business to spend their days gaming the system.
CORRECTION: A previous version of the editorial stated that Robert Wilkie was the acting secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs. He has since been confirmed, and the description has been changed accordingly. The Washington Examiner apologizes for the error.
