Would a government run Canadian-style healthcare system work in the United States?

A nation of 320 million people? Well, we already know the answer.

Just ask America's veterans. They've had government run healthcare for decades.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, known as the VA, runs the largest hospital and healthcare

system in America. The VA employs over 340,000 people twice the size of the Marine Corps.

And it has a $180 billion annual budget, making it the second largest department in the federal

government. Only the Department of Defense budget is bigger. The VA is a true single-payer

healthcare system. It runs over 150 hospitals and 1,400 community-based clinics across all 50 states.

The doctors, nurses, administrators, everyone that works for the VA is a government employee.

The system actively serves some 7 million patients, one-third of the 21 million veterans

alive in the U.S. today. Sounds impressive, right? But for the past few decades and especially

for veterans of the war in Vietnam, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan where I served,

the VA has been an abysmal failure. Inefficient, bureaucratic, and sometimes deadly.

Among veterans, horror stories about the VA abound. These stories were tragically brought to light

in 2014, when whistleblowers and phoenix revealed that 1700 veterans there had waited an

average of 115 days just to receive an initial appointment. According to the VA's official policy,

that wait time should have been no more than 14 days. As if that wasn't bad enough,

the Phoenix VA then lied about it, releasing falsified wait lists to the public to cover its tracks.

Phoenix turned out to be the norm, not the exception. The VA's inspector general found systemic

problems across the country. In Fort Collins, Colorado, for example, clerks were instructed to falsify

records to show that doctors were seeing more patients than they actually were. In Columbia,

South Carolina, delays in diagnosis and treatment directly led to the deaths of multiple patients.

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