NEWSWEEK.COM 33
HEALTH CAREAnswering the Critics
to be sure, the va has had its share of well-
publicized problems. In January, the VA demanded
a co-pay on replacement prosthetic limbs from a vet
when the prostheses were stolen from his room at a
VA long-term-care home. VA officials allegedly tried
to discredit a legislative aide who reported being
groped by another patient at a VA facility. A Federal
grand jury is currently looking into whether a for-
mer nursing assistant at a VA hospital in West Virgin-
ia may have killed 11 patients with insulin overdoses.
In one of the more sensational scandals, in 2014
some VA employees were reportedly falsifying re-
cords of how long patients had to wait for appoint-
ments and as many as 40 vets died while waiting.
Further investigation suggested that the problemwasn’t unusually long wait times, but rather that
the VA had been given a target by government of-
ficials of limiting wait times to under 14 days—a
system-wide goal that few private health care sys-
tems could meet. A report later that year from the
VA inspector general found that six of the deaths
might have been related to wait times, and that the
other deaths were consistent with the condition of
the patients in question, most of whom had com-
plex health challenges.
The VA doesn’t offer excuses for the falsifications.
The VA’s Clancy points out that as a large govern-
ment agency the VA has to accept a greater level of
scrutiny than its counterparts in the private sector.
Its flaws are more readily decried in the national
press and it is more directly answerable to the pub-
lic. In the end, she argues, that closer, less-forgiv-
ing, more visible oversight ultimately leads to more
accountability and improvement. The VA’s overall
record seems to bear that claim out.
The VA’s foibles also become political weapons
in the ongoing debate over the virtues of private
versus government-run health care. One of the big-
gest VA-health-care-related complaints coming out
of Washington recently doesn’t concern the VA’s
poor performance but rather the push toward pri-
vatization. Veterans’ advocates complain that the
Trump administration seems to be pushing more
vets toward private health care, in part by not fill-
ing some VA health care positions that are current-
ly open. “The administration is setting us up to fail
so they can dismantle veterans’ preferred health
care provider,” Alma Lee, National Veterans Affairs
council president for the American Federation of
Government Employees, told the Military Times.
If the VA does in fact provide a better health
care system than what most Americans have ac-
cess to, then vets have surely earned that privi-
lege. Nobody is proposing a similar health care
system for all Americans. But Sanders’ Medicare
for All plan would establish universal coverage,
and it would almost certainly be a tougher ne-
gotiator of prices than private insurers are. It
would likely force private hospitals to focus on
care that delivers the best health results at the
lowest cost, as the VA does today.
In those respects, Medicare for All could remake
the U.S. health care system in the VA’s image. To hear
most vets tell it, that would be an improvement.POLITICAL FODDER
The VA’s mistakes come
up in debates over the
virtues of private versus
government-run health
care. Left to right: A
demonstrator in support of
Medicare for All; Sanders
joins a protest of a hospital
closure in Philadelphia;
Norma Shaw, whose
husband died from an
insulin injection at the VA
Hospital in Clarksburg,
West Virginia, in 2019.