The Veterans Administration has long been known as the worst health care system in America. With over 300,000 employees, the VA is the second-largest department of the federal government. Its vast network of hospitals is government-financed and government-operated.

Demands on the VA have vastly increased in recent years and huge numbers of troops survive war only to need care for complicated injuries. Returning vets are finding themselves having to line up and wait way too long for treatment. Some have died waiting. These are deaths that could have been prevented with timely treatment.

Now we’re discovering that the VA has been fudging its data and things are even worse. Much worse. An Inspector General report on 26 VA facilities
is expected to reveal that they’ve been massaging wait-list records and hiding backlogs

We’d better not miss the message these revelations are sending us about government-run health care. As a country, we need to ask ourselves: If the government cannot make its health care system, a system over which it has full control, work for our vets, what makes anyone think it can run a system that will work for the rest of us?

Proponents of a national heath care system tout the VA as a model. Princeton economist and Noebel Prize winner Paul Krugman called the VA “a triumph of socialized medicine.” As recently as 2011, Dr. Krugman wrote in his New York Times column that the VA is  “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.”

But, as the Wall Street Journal points out, the VA has its own perverse incentive that results in long lines, delayed care, worse outcomes, even death among patients. The VA gets a budget and it’s supposed to provide a guaranteed level of benefits. Congress keeps appropriating money. But, with the exploding need, and, often, gross mismanagement, there’s never enough. So veterans wait in long lines to get  “free” treatment from the VA.

There’s another perverse incentive: Compensation that is too low to attract doctors, especially specialists in high-demand fields like physical therapy and gastroenterology.

A centrally-run system has got to have competency and transparency. Our government displayed neither in the rollout of ObamaCare. Though not socialized medicine — yet — this is a reminder of the dangers inherent in centralizing government power in health care.

What do we do when so many who have served depend upon this system?

Senator John Mc Cain says that, “Veterans have earned the right to choose where and when they get their medical care.”

Avik Roy of Forbes Magazine says, “give vets the ability to take the money that the government spends on them and use it to buy high-quality, private insurance.”

Wait-lists, inferior care, and — yes — rationing are inevitable in a government-run health care system. We should learn from our mistakes, not repeat them.