May 21, 2014

In case anyone thought this was limited to the talking heads over at Faux "news," here's your so-called "liberal media" with one of their regulars, retired Army Col. Jack Jacobs, doing his best to help Sen. John McCain with his long term goal of privatizing the Veterans Administration.

MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell asked Jacobs to respond to McCain's comments this Wednesday, where he called President Obama's response in today's press conference "insufficient."

Here's how Jacobs responded:

MITCHELL: What is your response to what happened today?

JACOBS: Well, I think John McCain is right. I don't always agree with him, but he had a very interesting point there, and that is that the response itself is effectively too little too late. The president should have been talking about this for a long time, ever since it began.

Don't forget we had big problems not that long ago when the wait times at the Veterans Administration was as long as two years in some cases. It's been halved. It's much lower, but it's still much too long and the president should have been talking about the VA and done something about it long before now. So John McCain is right.

He raises an interesting point about the systemic nature of the veterans' medical agency and the fact... one has to ask the question of whether or not it is ever going to be capable of delivering what we want, and that is timely, first class medical care to the men and women who've served this country. My conclusion is that because it's a bureaucracy effectively, it's a large and ponderous bureaucracy, and that does sound like a redundancy, but it's an extremely large and an extremely ponderous bureaucracy, that it will never be able to deliver what we want no matter who runs it and no matter how much money we give it.

Here's more on that notion from our friend Jon Perr: Privatizing VA health care would be the greatest tragedy of all.

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