The left says America needs a single-payer health care system like that of Canada. Would it work? According to a new Prager U video, we actually need not look far to see if it actually will. That example lies in our own backyard under the name Veterans Affairs (VA), a disastrous single-payer system.
"The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (known as the VA) runs the largest hospital and health care system in America," begins the video. "The VA employs over 340,000 people – twice the size of the Marine Corps. And it has a $180 billion annual budget, making it the second largest department in the Federal Government. Only the Department of Defense budget is bigger."
The numbers show the VA quite correctly does represent a single-payer system, given that it runs over "150 hospitals and 1,400 community-based clinics across all 50 states," employing all their staff, from doctors to administrators, on the taxpayer dime.
Anyone remotely familiar with VA knows this institution does little to bring harmony to our veterans.
Among veterans, horror stories about the VA abound. These stories were tragically brought to light in 2014, when whistleblowers in Phoenix revealed that 1,700 veterans there had waited an average of 115 days just to receive an initial appointment. According to the VA’s official policy, that wait time should have been no more than 14 days.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Phoenix VA then lied about it, releasing falsified waiting lists to the public to cover its tracks.
Phoenix turned out to be the norm, not the exception. The VA’s inspector general found systemic problems across the country.
In Fort Collins, Colorado, for example, clerks were instructed to falsify records to show that doctors were seeing more patients than they actually were.
In Columbia, South Carolina, delays in diagnosis and treatment directly led to the deaths of multiple patients. The VA program there had nearly 4,000 backlogged appointments despite a $1 million grant earmarked to reduce delays.
No matter how many of these scandals break, politicians always say "spend more money," but the VA has not improved.
The VA’s budget has almost doubled since 2009. They’ve hired 100,000 new people in the past decade. Wait times have actually gone up, yet not one administrator was fired for the wait-list scandal.
The real solution to the problem is not more government, more money, and more bureaucracy; it’s more competition, accountability, and transparency. Let the money follow the veteran. If veterans were given vouchers that they could use at any health care provider – private or government – they would control their own care. This, in turn, would force the VA to compete for their business, encouraging staff to treat patients as customers, not just as names on a waiting list.
