{"id":25901,"date":"2014-05-23T08:33:59","date_gmt":"2014-05-23T13:33:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=25901"},"modified":"2014-05-23T08:33:59","modified_gmt":"2014-05-23T13:33:59","slug":"he-was-for-the-veterans-health-administration-before-he-was-against-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/05\/23\/he-was-for-the-veterans-health-administration-before-he-was-against-it\/","title":{"rendered":"He was for the Veterans Health Administration before he was against it"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <em>Wall Street Journal<\/em>&#8216;s <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/news\/articles\/SB10001424052702304479704579577761333004746?mg=reno64-wsj&#038;url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702304479704579577761333004746.html\" target=\"_blank\">James Taranto<\/a> rounds up some amusing-in-hindsight bloviations by Paul Krugman about the efficiencies of the Veterans Health Administration:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>There was no ObamaCare in January 2006, when <a href=\"http:\/\/query.nytimes.com\/gst\/fullpage.html?res=F20717FC3A5B0C748EDDA80894DE404482\" target=\"_blank\">former Enron adviser<\/a> Paul Krugman wrote this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>I know about a health care system that has been highly successful in containing costs, yet provides excellent care. And the story of this system&#8217;s success provides a helpful corrective to anti-government ideology. For the government doesn&#8217;t just pay the bills in this system &mdash; it runs the hospitals and clinics.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>No, I&#8217;m not talking about some faraway country. The system in question is our very own Veterans Health Administration, whose success story is one of the best-kept secrets in the American policy debate.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The &#8220;secret&#8221; of the VA&#8217;s &#8220;success,&#8221; Krugman argued, &#8220;is the fact that it&#8217;s a universal, integrated system.&#8221; That saves on administrative costs and allows for efficient record-keeping. Krugman acknowledged that the VA had a history of mismanagement and mediocre care, until &#8220;reforms beginning in the mid-1990&#8217;s transformed the system.&#8221; But wait. Hasn&#8217;t it been a universal, integrated system all along? Maybe the secret is something else. At any rate, the Phoenix revelations suggest it&#8217;s the system&#8217;s failures that are being kept secret.<\/p>\n<p>Krugman lamented that his argument &#8220;runs completely counter to the pro-privatization, anti-government conventional wisdom that dominates today&#8217;s Washington.&#8221; That was 2006, remember, when Republicans had the White House and both houses of Congress. If Krugman is to be believed &mdash; a big &#8220;if,&#8221; to be sure &mdash; the Bush administration did a far better job running the VA than the Obama administration is doing now. Which reminds us of something Waldman wrote: &#8220;There&#8217;s an old saying that when they&#8217;re out of office, Republicans argue that government is inefficient and incompetent, and when they get in office, they set about to prove it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Krugman concluded that 2006 column as follows:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>Ideology can&#8217;t hold out against reality forever. Cries of &#8220;socialized medicine&#8221; didn&#8217;t, in the end, succeed in blocking the creation of Medicare. And farsighted thinkers are already suggesting that the Veterans Health Administration, not President Bush&#8217;s unrealistic vision of a system in which people go &#8220;comparative shopping&#8221; for medical care the way they do when buying tile (his example, not mine), represents the true future of American health care.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com\/2013\/10\/01\/good-glitches\/\" target=\"_blank\">Good Glitches<\/a>,&#8221; anyone?<\/p>\n<p>Krugman managed to get two more columns out of the glorious VA. One, in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2006\/09\/04\/opinion\/04krugman.html\" target=\"_blank\">September 2006<\/a>, also damned Medicare Advantage and complained that the administration opposed the idea of letting elderly vets use Medicare benefits at VA hospitals:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>&#8220;Conservatives,&#8221; writes Time, &#8220;fear such an arrangement would be a Trojan horse, setting up an even larger national health-care program and taking more business from the private sector.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Think about that: they won&#8217;t let vets on Medicare buy into the V.A. system, not because they believe this policy initiative would fail, but because they&#8217;re afraid it would succeed.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>OK, but think about this: According to <a href=\"http:\/\/the-military-guide.com\/2013\/09\/23\/the-affordable-care-act-and-military-veterans\/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>The-Military-Guide.com<\/em><\/a>, &#8220;if you&#8217;re eligible for any level of VA care, whether it&#8217;s high-priority or low-priority, you&#8217;re no longer eligible for ACA exchange subsidies.&#8221; (ACA is an abbreviation for PPACA, in turn an abbreviation for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare&#8217;s official title.) There are worse things than being excluded from ObamaCare, of course &mdash; but the VA may be one of them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Wall Street Journal&#8216;s James Taranto rounds up some amusing-in-hindsight bloviations by Paul Krugman about the efficiencies of the Veterans Health Administration: There was no ObamaCare in January 2006, when former Enron adviser Paul Krugman wrote this: I know about a health care system that has been highly successful in containing costs, yet provides excellent [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,84,66,5,13],"tags":[158,668,937,413,162],"class_list":["post-25901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-government","category-health-science","category-military","category-usa","tag-barackobama","tag-georgewbush","tag-obamacare","tag-scandal","tag-socializedmedicine"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6JL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25901"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25902,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25901\/revisions\/25902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}