To the editors:
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I was surprised to see the June 23 Reader cover story on the Veterans Administration’s hospitals and the Hot Type piece on the AMA and “universal health care” in the same issue. Michael Miner takes a strident, clearly pro-free health care tone, but he would do well to read the cover story on our existing free health care system. A system which is tied up in politics and bureaucracy and which, as the story’s author Jeffrey Felshman points out, is creating angry militants. For eight years I have argued publicly and privately that before we start an ill-conceived, gigantic new government bureaucracy, show me that you can run and reform the present one. I have been met with the same stony silence that greeted vets when they tried to find out about Agent Orange during the Carter administration.
I would also like to point out that the collapse of the VA hospitals is happening on the watch of the single biggest proponent of universal health care, President Clinton. This contradiction does not surprise me.
