Helpful reforms are on the way at Veterans Affairs

" 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.