Privatizing Democracy

by digby

Ezra makes a good point that should be emphasized because the story is getting very muddled:

THE VA THEY AIN’T. Reader RN writes in to say:

Walter Reed is an Army hospital, not a VA facility. As an active duty soldier, the care I received at Evans Army Community Hospital (the Army hospital in Colorado Springs) was best described as mediocre; the care I’ve received at the VA Medical Center in Denver (especially after I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis) is outstanding.

The press corps has done a very, very poor job explaining this, but Walter Reed and the other hospitals being criticized are military hospitals, not veteran’s hospitals (VA). They are run by the military, not the Veteran’s Administration, which is why the Secretary of the Army, rather than the Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs, was cut loose.

My Dad is a retired veteran who was, until recently, cared for in the military system, not the VA, as retired military folks have long been. The old men were kicked out recently and turned over to medicare, which was sort of a shame since the military system kind of specializied in old men’s diseases for years. But before they kicked him out the decline in the quality of care recently was astonishing. For decades they were very, very good and then they just — weren’t.

I was unaware of the privatizing, but I’m sure that’s the problem. It undoubtedly accounts for the fact that they 86’d the old guys. Like all health care for profit, they try to get rid of any sick person they possible can. There’s no money in it. (At least they had an alternative, unlike these poor wounded guys who probably don’t have health insurance other than the military.)

As Matt Yglesias explains today, privatizing is not some sort of magical ritual that automatically results in goodness and light. Indeed, when it comes to government services it is just a plain old patronage machine that delivers to the favored politicians at the expense of the people:

I posted on the general problem here last month — it’s not as if there are dozens of United States Armies all competing against one another to run the best hospitals and choosing among a variety of suppliers of hospital services in a dynamic marketplace where the Army that runs a bad hospital goes out of business.

You’ve got private profits, private corporations, privatization, and all sorts of other private stuff, but you don’t have a market you have a patronage mill and you have suffering soldiers. The correct way to privatize government services if you don’t think they should be provided by the government is to just have the government not perform the service. If it’s something you think the government should provide — medical care for injured soldiers would be, I think, an uncontroversial case — then the government needs to provide it.

This, again, shows what’s wrong with Republicans running government. Their policies have now been proved to be terminally flawed in virtually every area of responsibility. This one, like so many others, has ripped off taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars that went directly into the pockets of well-heeled GOP contributors and average American have suffered for it.

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