There’s no reason for the Walter Reed scandal to be a partisan affair, but over the last couple of weeks, it has been. Seriously wounded troops have been badly mistreated. The country hasn’t been serving them as well as they served us. It’s a national disgrace in desperate need of an immediate remedy.
But the outrage seems to be largely one-sided. When lawmakers started offering proposals to address the controversy, they were all Dems. When bloggers started expressing outrage, most were on the left. While the media reported on the conditions recuperating troops have to deal with, Fox News decided it didn’t want to talk about it. Why does support for wounded veterans have to be limited to our side of the aisle?
I suspect it’s become rather reflexive. Troops are being seriously injured in a war Bush launched and are being mistreated by facilities Bush is ultimately responsible for. To condemn the mistreatment is, necessarily, to cast aspersions on the administration. Apparently, that still isn’t something that comes easily to the right.
But they can’t very well say nothing about a massive scandal about mistreated veterans. What they need is a way to fit the scandal into the right-wing talking points, so their ideological worldview can stay intact. Exhibit A, by way of Michelle Malkin.
Newsflash: Government-run health care sucks
The Washington Post is back today with another story about the pitfalls of the military health care system. Like I said when the WaPo series was launched, these failures are damnable — and nothing new. David Bernstein at The Volokh Conspiracy adds:
“If private companies had mismanaged outpatient care for veterans the way the V.A. system has, there would be strong calls from all the usual quarters for a government takeover, and proclamations of how we can’t trust ‘greedy’ for-profit companies to take care of veterans. Funny how this thought process doesn’t seem to work in reverse, except among ‘free market ideologues,’ who have been criticizing the V.A. for years.”
Will the Bush-bashers join with free-market critics to effect real change and help the troops who need and deserve better care? We’ll see
There’s a reason this argument sounds familiar.
In 2005, when the federal response to Hurricane Katrina was an international disgrace, conservatives quickly stumbled upon a convenient rationalization: “See? We told you government doesn’t work.”
The argument had a major flaw: FEMA was an effective and efficient government agency under Clinton. It prepared for, and responded to, disasters all the time, and did so exactly as it was designed to do. Bush came in, staffed the agency with cronies, decided it wasn’t important anymore, and sure enough, FEMA fell apart. Katrina wasn’t a failure of government; it was a failure of Bush’s style of government.
The same is true here. Some of our friends on the right have decided that the real lesson of Walter Reed is that “government-run health care sucks” and that we apparently need to replace VA services with “free-market” solutions.
But that’s missing the key point: VA hospitals provide a model for how government-run health care programs are supposed to work, and Clinton was responsible for making VA hospitals among the best in the country.
The Washington Post’s recent series about the crappy care at Walter Reed Hospital has been a real eye-opener. But the culprit probably isn’t money. The hospitals operated by the Veterans Administration had a similar reputation 20 years ago (remember Tom Cruise in Born on the Fourth of July?), but as you’ve probably read in dozens of articles recently, they’re now among the best in the country — and the VA budget is no more generous now than it was a decade ago. It was management changes during the Clinton administration, not money, that have made the entire VHA medical system among the best in the country, and the first person to point that out was Phil Longman, who wrote “Best Care Anywhere” for our January 2005 issue:
“An outfit called the National Committee for Quality Assurance today ranks health-care plans on 17 different performance measures….And who do you suppose this year’s winner is: Johns Hopkins? Mayo Clinic? Massachusetts General? Nope. In every single category, the VHA system outperforms the highest rated non-VHA hospitals.
“….If this gives you cognitive dissonance, it should. The story of how and why the VHA became the benchmark for quality medicine in the United States suggests that much of what we think we know about health care and medical economics is just wrong. It’s natural to believe that more competition and consumer choice in health care would lead to greater quality and lower costs, because in almost every other realm, it does….But when it comes to health care, it’s a government bureaucracy that’s setting the standard for maintaining best practices while reducing costs, and it’s the private sector that’s lagging in quality.”
When government screws up, as it has with wounded vets, the answer isn’t that government is intrinsically bad. That’s an excuse, but it’s also lazy and wrong.
Update: Just to further emphasize the point, and the extent to which Malkin’s argument is backwards, problems at Walter Reed were triggered by — you guessed it — privatization.
Second Update: Longman tells Kevin Drum today:
“My email box is overflowing with people wondering what I think of the VA now that it has been enveloped in scandal. From this I conclude many Americans are taking the wrong lesson from the series. If you are left with the impression that Walter Reed is a VA hospital, then it’s just a short leap to concluding that the problems exposed there are indicative of the veterans health care system as a whole. And from that point, conservatives conclude that the whole story just goes to show what happens when the government gets into the health care business, while liberals use the same VA ‘scandal’ to bash Bush.
“Look, the VA has its problems. Because the White House and Congress won’t give it the funding to honor past promises to veterans, it now has to limit new enrollments to vets who have service-related illness or who can meet a strict means test. It’s also having trouble ramping up to meet the needs of the unexpectedly large number of young vets diagnosed with mental illness. But despite these challenges, the fact remains that the VA enjoys the highest rate of consumer satisfaction of any American health care system, public or private.”