The problems with the VA are structural

Larry Kudlow:

The VA problem is not Shinseki; it's socialism. The Veterans Affairs health care system is completely government run. It is a pure single-payer program. National Review Editor Rich Lowry calls it "an island of socialism in American health care." He is right. I've been arguing this all week.

So perhaps Democrats and Republicans will get together to sack VA Secretary Eric Shinseki. But that won't change a thing. In fact, it's a distraction.

The long waits for treatment, with excessive delays resulting in as many as 40 deaths, are a tragically predictable outcome. This is the result of bureaucratic rationing, price controls, inefficiencies and the inevitable cover-ups. It was the late James Buchanan, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, who taught us all about bureaucratic incentives in his seminal work on public choice.

So if Congress thinks it can find somebody who can tame the VA bureaucracy, it should go right ahead. But the statist VA health care system, which in so many ways mirrors the government-run health care problems in Britain, Europe and Canada, must be completely changed.

We owe it to our brave veterans. Think of it on the eve on the Memorial Day, when we honor all of our veterans who fought bravely for our freedom. Returning vets today deserve an efficient health care system, not this slip-shod failure. And the only way to do that is to deliver choice and market competition.

Market competition will control costs and more efficiently distribute services. Profit motive, not run-amok bureaucrats, will discipline the system. Better doctors and health specialists will be attracted to this profit-based system. And our veterans at long last will get the medical care they deserve.

Don't tell me the problem is not enough government money. That is nonsense. Everyone should go read John Merline's article in Investor's Business Daily headlined "VA Health Spending Soars as Vets Decline." Here are some of his numbers: From 2000 to 2013, VA outlays nearly tripled while the population of veterans declined by 4.3 million. And Medicaid-care spending, which consumes about 40 percent of the VA's budget, has climbed 193 percent over those years, while the number of patients served by the VA each year went up only 68 percent.
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There is more.

Democrats can never admit the VA's structural failures because they want more such control over all our healthcare.  They should be forced to forced to face reality and make drastic changes that go beyond Gen. Shinseki's lack of ability.