Shulkin Out at VA

President Donald Trump has dismissed Secretary of Veterans Affairs Dr. David Shulkin amid disagreement within the administration over the future of the beleaguered Veterans’ Health Administration, a single‐​payer health system whose closest analogue is the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. 


In a farewell printed in the New York Times, Shulkin criticizes proposals to improve health care for veterans by privatizing the VHA:

The private sector, already struggling to provide adequate access to care in many communities, is ill‐​prepared to handle the number and complexity of patients that would come from closing or downsizing V.A. hospitals and clinics, particularly when it involves the mental health needs of people scarred by the horrors of war. Working with community providers to adequately ensure that veterans’ needs are met is a good practice. But privatization leading to the dismantling of the department’s extensive health care system is a terrible idea. The department’s understanding of service‐​related health problems, its groundbreaking research and its special ability to work with military veterans cannot be easily replicated in the private sector.

Actually, Shulkin is probably right. The VHA has built expertise in treating the special challenges veterans face (which is not to say the VHA always treats veterans well). If privatization “dismantl[es] the department’s extensive health care system,” it could take the private sector years to fill in the gap. Simply “closing or downsizing V.A. hospitals and clinics” could well be “a terrible idea.”


Fortunately, that is not what privatization means. To privatize does not mean to dismantle. It means to transfer ownership of a resource from the government to private individuals. 


Privatization of the VHA need not dismantle any aspect of that unique system. All that privatization would or need do is transfer ownership of VA hospitals and clinics–of all the system’s physical capital–to the people that system exists to serve: veterans. The VHA would continue to exist as the nation’s largest integrated health system, and would preserve its capacity to meet the unique needs of veterans, but under the control of veterans themselves rather than politicians who persistently renege on the commitments they make to veterans.


Cato Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy studies Christopher A. Preble and I explain in the New York Times how privatization can have bipartisan appeal:

The alternative system we propose combines the universal goal of improving veterans’ benefits with conservative Republicans’ preference for market incentives and antiwar Democrats’ desire to make it harder to wage war. 

Read more about this bipartisan VA privatization proposal in Chapter 14, Veterans Benefits of Cato’s Handbook for Policymakers (8th ed.).