This is the Thursday March 8th episode of the Cato Daily Podcast.

Welcome, I'm Anastasia Yuglova.

During an emotional hearing Monday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee,

top Army officials acknowledged that they had failed to properly care for wounded veterans

admitted to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

As the scandal continues to expose the neglect that is apparently rampant in the Veterans Administration.

Cato's Director of Health and Welfare Studies Michael Tanner offers one possible solution.

The Veterans Administration has been held up as a model for health care and how other hospitals should be run and now we found out about the scandal at Walter Reed.

So how can we talk about national health care given the backlogs and inefficiency at just this one government facility?

Well it's certainly possible to take this line of reasoning too far.

It is true in fact that the actual health care delivered at the VA and Walter Reed was actually

quite high although there are some problems with things like prescription drugs

where the latest and best drugs are not available to veterans.

But in general, the quality of care they receive is quite high.

Still, the scandal at Walter Reed does illustrate some of the problems with government-run health care

that I think are very

applicable to national health care. First of all the system is chronically

underfunded. Every year the VA has to go to Congress and ask for more money. They claim that they don't have enough

money to service all the veterans that are coming in. The fact that this is a politically

determined number not dealt with by demand or what patients need shows that it's just like the sort of global budgets

that are within national health care systems. Second, what resources they

have are politically allocated. There are VA hospitals that have very low utilization rates and yet are kept open because they're in some powerful congressional committee chairman's district.

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