With all the corruption and unnecessary deaths in the Veterans Administration hospitals, it is interesting to see who has touted it as the big success story

With even the Obama administration admitting that 27 veterans have died because of the waiting list scam, Democrats even having a hard time with the VA now.  But a few years ago, while these problems were festering, liberals were pointing to the VA as the example that we should all follow.  As to the Obama administration's explanation On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” NBC News chief Pentagon reporter Jim Miklaszewski claimed, “You have a VA that is overwhelmed and under-resourced,” John Merline points out that was incorrect. 

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. . . . Yes, this is ‘socialized medicine’… But it works, and suggests what it will take to solve the troubles of US health care more broadly. . . .

Nicholas Kristof of the Times wrote in 2009:

Take the hospital system run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the largest integrated health system in the United States. It is fully government run, much more “socialized medicine” than is Canadian health care with its private doctors and hospitals. And the system for veterans is by all accounts one of the best-performing and most cost-effectiveelements in the American medical establishment. . . .

Uwe Reinhardt of Princeton wrote in the pages of the Times:

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?  . . .

Ironically, President Obama now explains that the current problems are nothing surprising, with the VA’s issues go back years:

[A]ll of us, whether here in Washington or all across the country, have to stay focused on the larger mission, which is upholding our sacred trust to all of our veterans, bringing the VA system into the 21st century, which is not an easy task….  caring for our veterans is not an issue that popped up in recent weeks. Some of the problems with respect to how veterans are able to access the benefits that they've earned, that's not a new issue.  . . .

Click to make the screen shot from the website from when Obama was president-elect larger.