Representative Andy Harris pushes for privatization of some veterans’ healthcare

 When it was announced that as part of the plan to ease the backlog in the Veterans Affairs hospitals VA Secretary Eric Shinseki would allow veterans to seek care in private sector hospitals I threw out this question: would our veterans be better off if the Federal government provided them with their healthcare insurance and allowed them to use the private sector for all of their healthcare needs?

  I went on to say: Maybe the VA hospitals could be privatized over time for it is my opinion that the private sector, while imperfect, is always a better, and more efficient, option than a government run program.

  It now appears as if I am not alone in this line of thinking because today Representative Andy Harris has proposed this very idea. Here is more:

Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) is hoping to resolve the “bureaucratic mess” that is the Veterans Affairs office by pushing a plan that would allow privatization of some vets’ health care.

“I’m going to describe a system where we begin to decompress the VA health care system, which is obviously overburdened, and begin to consider offering veterans who are newly assigned to the VA the benefit option of going to the private system and being taken care of in their local hospitals instead of in the VA system,” Harris told “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday.

  Something has to be done about this problem and this seems to be a step in the right direction to me. This will not be easy to accomplish, and it will be met with skepticism, but our veterans deserve better than what they have been getting over the years and in my opinion Eric Shinseki’s proposal is a good starting point.