EDITORIAL: To salute all who served, privatize VA

Today is Veterans Day in the United States, a holiday to honor military veterans who bravely took on the job of defending freedoms we frequently take for granted. There are about 22 million veterans in America today, one for every 14 residents, so it shouldn’t be difficult to find somebody to offer a handshake and a thank you.

Something else that shouldn’t be so difficult: making absolutely certain those veterans are taken care of, particularly when it comes to their physical and mental health.

Unfortunately, Veterans Affairs, the agency charged with preserving the health and welfare of our veterans, is a symbol of federal incompetence. If the agency wasn’t neglecting veterans through unacceptable delays in processing disability and compensation claims, it was harming veterans by making them wait months for appointments for routine care. Far from serving as a perk for veterans — a reward for their sacrifices — the VA had become a trap from which Americans in need could not escape.

Veterans will long remember 2014 as the year the VA’s failures and cover-ups finally erupted into a national scandal. As if the substandard service wasn’t enough reason to justify intervention, investigators determined VA officials had falsified records to make wait times appear reasonable. That led to the ouster of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, the hiring of Bob McDonald, the retired president and chairman of Procter &Gamble, as his replacement, and the summer signing of legislation to inject more than $16 billion into the agency. Reforms were supposed to make it easier for veterans to get care outside the VA system and give the VA the ability to fire its worst employees.

On Monday, Mr. McDonald announced a massive restructuring of the agency, designed to make it easier for veterans to access all VA services. But Mr. McDonald faces serious challenges in holding corrupt VA officials accountable and hiring the manpower needed to care for all veterans, especially the millions discharged since 9/11. In an interview aired Sunday on the CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes,” Mr. McDonald said he was pursuing discipline against more than 1,000 of his 315,000 employees. But even this year’s reforms can’t speed up federal discipline and termination proceedings, which are notoriously slow and stacked in favor of workers. And even if the VA could hire 28,000 doctors, nurses and medical professionals, as Mr. McDonald desires, the removal of those workers from the private sector or other government positions would shift staffing shortages and place new pressures on health care access everywhere.

This summer’s VA reforms didn’t go far enough. If it’s OK for some veterans to seek care outside the VA system, shouldn’t every veteran have that choice? We’d do our veterans a far better service by providing them with private-sector health plans or vouchers they could use at any doctor’s office or hospital in the nation.

Anybody who believes nationalized health care is the answer to this country’s health care problems — and many still believe that to be true, even after the awful rollout of Obamacare — need only look at the unaccountable VA system to see that a government medicine monopoly is not a viable or affordable solution.

The best way for Washington to honor our veterans is to privatize the VA.

Happy Veterans Day.