Veterans Should Have the Same Health Care Plan as Congress

The VA budget request for FY 2015 is $163.9 billion. The VA serves 8.76 million veterans per year. That works out to 18,710 dollars per year per veteran. Enough for good coverage for every vet, if they received the money and could spend it on local doctors and hospitals.

But the veterans don’t get the money. They can’t just go to any doctor or hospital in their community. They have to travel long distances and go on waiting lists at VA institutions. They suffer long delays and inefficiencies.

We don’t run most things this way, even government programs. Take the food stamp program. We don’t build institutional farms run by government employees in distant locations and force the poor to make pilgrimages to them. We just let families buy the food they want locally. There aren’t any month-long delays or chronic food shortages.

Even less top-down and centralized is the Internet. We don’t have a Federal Data Administration (FDA) to impose a nineteen-year approval process on new software, or an American Mainframe Association (AMA) to prevent programmers from working until they’re 30, or tax laws that force you to buy your computer through your employer. As a result, computers, smartphones, routers, etc. continually improve and drop in price.

Health care for veterans should be just as important to us as our Internet connection. If it were, we would unleash competition. We would let veterans use their hard-earned health care dollars wherever it was best for them.

While we’re at it, civilians need health care too. But at both state and federal level, Democrats are focused on removing all competition from the system.

When Jeanne Shaheen took office as governor in 1996, there were over twenty health insurance companies competing in New Hampshire. Right now, if you’re stuck in the NH Obamacare system, you have exactly one “choice”: Hassan campaign contributor Anthem (and a severely limited network of hospitals). The situation is supposed to improve slightly this fall, but the field will still be limited to three or four favored companies.

Nationally, many of the architects of Obamacare openly advocate a no-competition system. This is their Final Solution to healthcare, a VA-like system expanded to cover the whole country and give everyone “free” healthcare that never innovates, never improves, and never goes down in price. (Except for themselves, of course. The Congress has exempted itself from its own regulations; a Congressional patient has 2,250 different medical plans available through their FEHBP.)

Veterans (and civilians) should have the same health care choices as Congress. Competition is the cure for health care, as it is for most everything.