An amusing compilation of earlier Leftist praise for the Veteran's Administration health care system. I won't quote all of the geniuses involved only a few of my favorites. The link will get you to the rest.
Paul Krugman in 2011 wrote of the VA’s “huge success story”: Multiple surveys have found the VHA providing better care than most Americans receive, even as the agency has held cost increases well below those facing Medicare and private insurers…the VHA is an integrated system, which provides health care as well as paying for it. So it’s free from the perverse incentives created when doctors and hospitals profit from expensive tests and procedures, whether or not those procedures actually make medical sense. "Krugman added, “Yes, this is ‘socialized medicine’…But it works, and suggests what it will take to solve the troubles of US health care more broadly.”" Krugman has his own Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences because he's just so damned smart.
Nicholas Kristof of the Times wrote in 2009: Remarkably, Americans of all political stripes have long reserved for our veterans the purest form of socialized medicine, the vast health system operated by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (generally known as the V.A. health system). If socialized medicine is as bad as so many on this side of the Atlantic claim, why have both political parties ruling this land deemed socialized medicine the best health system for military veterans? Or do they just not care about them? Kristof is right smart, too. How do I know? He's a regular columnist for the New York Times, the publication for right smart people.
Jonathan Golob of The Seattle Stranger has written in the same vein: “Every time I read about a Teabagger ranting about how socialized medicine will destroy this country I think of the VA system. There it is, a huge and vastly important universal healthcare system—government run, single payer and therefore socialist—right here in the brave and privatized United States: The Veterans Affairs hospitals.” Yeah, take that, pesky Teabaggers. Ok, never heard of the guy but since he thinks like Kristof and Krugman he must be really smart. I bet he even reads the NYT.
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Fri May 23, 2014 1:44 am
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Front Porch Punditry
