BlogTalk: Seething Over Vets’ Care

[Joanne98]

March 5, 2007, 6:07 pm
BlogTalk: Seething Over Vets’ Care
By Sarah Wheaton

The blogosphere is in uniform agreement that the conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, as reported in a series of Washington Post exposés, are unacceptable. Of course, they split again when it comes to assigning blame.
Jason at COUNTERCOLUMN, a right-leaning blog that focuses on military issues, blamed lawmakers of both parties for fighting “tooth and nail” the Army’s efforts to “close some bases so they could redirect resources into modernizing facilities.”
Some conservative blogs expressed no surprise at the report today about problems at both military- and Veterans Administration-run facilities. After all, they’re run by the government, they argue. David Bernstein writes in The Volokh Conspiracy, “If private companies had mismanaged outpatient care for veterans the way the V.A. system has, there would be strong calls from all the usual quarters for a government takeover, and proclamations of how we can’t trust ‘greedy’ for-profit companies to take care of veterans.”
But the liberal blogosphere, fueled by research in the blog Raw Story and an opinion column today by The Times’s Paul Krugman, flipped the argument on its head, at least when it comes to Walter Reed (which, again, is not run by the V.A.). Apparently, a company called IAP Worldwide Services had a large contract to help run the Washington military hospital.
“Chalk the declining conditions at the military hospitals up as another victory in the GOP passion for contracting out government services,” writes Matthew Yglesias in his blog.
Jim Henley, an accounting analyst who runs the left-leaning blog Unqualified Offerings, offers his take on why privatization didn’t work under these circumstances:
Basically, if it’s a situation where the service has many buyers and the new private entity will have to sell to them, presume in favor of privatization. But if the new arrangement would have a private corporation selling to one buyer, the government, presume that the “privatized” situation would much, much worse than good old fashioned bureaucracy.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/blogtalk-seething-over-vets-care/

[benddem]

1. shows what Volokh

knows. The VA's inpatient care is highly rated consistently. It is the VA bureaucracy that is the problem.

[Joanne98]

3. It's a Halliburton problem.

[Joanne98]

2. They mentioned our very own Raw Story...

RAW STORY ROCKS! :)