Today’s top opinion: Dying in line
The news that American military veterans have died waiting for care from Veterans Affairs hospitals — and that the VA has been fudging the numbers to hide the long delays — is outrageous, but not terribly surprising. This is not the first big scandal to hit the department — remember the revolting conditions at Walter Reed? — and probably won’t be the last.
In the aftermath of the revelations, VA Secretary Eric Shinseki has shown deplorably little “loyalty down.” His chief project at the moment seems to be protecting the bureaucracy rather than the wounded men and women it is supposed to care for. The VA has tried to pass off the departure of undersecretary Robert Petzel as an example of swift action, but that official’s retirement had been announced six months ago. Yet even if he were getting fired his departure would fall woefully short. As the spokesman for one veterans’ group said, “We don’t need the VA to find a scapegoat. We need an actual plan to restore a culture of accountability.”
The scandal has taken on an inevitable political tinge in light of the country’s ongoing debate over health care. Supporters of more thorough government intervention in the marketplace sometimes have held up the VA as an example of how government can get things right. The New York Times’ Paul Krugman in particular has described it as a “huge policy success story” and a “living demonstration” to Republicans that “their (free-market) ideology is wrong.”
The free market is far from perfect. People die waiting for care in the private sector, too. The scandal at the VA offers a painful reminder that no system lives up to its advertising. President Obama has spent the past half-decade trying to make the nation’s health care system more to his liking, with mixed results. Now perhaps he could turn his attention, however briefly, to fixing that part of the system he is actually responsible for.
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