A few years ago New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was frequently heralding the Veterans Health Administration as a model of medical improvement in America. Another example of liberal ideology crushed by reality.

This Is Paul Krugman's Idea of Good Health Care Reform

BY JOHN MERLINE

06/10/2015 

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New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, shown here giving a lecture in Athens, Greece, has penned several op-eds praising the Veterans Health... View Enlarged Image

Afew years ago New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was frequently heralding the Veterans Health Administration as a model of medical improvement in America.

It is, he wrote, "a huge policy success story," that has "achieved a remarkable combination of rising quality and successful cost control."

One wonders if Krugman is aware of this story.

A decade ago, Veterans Affairs made plans to build a new hospital in the Denver area to serve nearly 400,000 veterans — for a relatively modest $328 million.

In the years since, the VA managed to spend $1.7 billion on the project — 418% more than promised — making it one of the most expensive hospitals in the world.

And still nowhere near finished, as NPR reports this week.

Unless Congress grants the VA more money soon, construction will halt, costing taxpayers still more money. Alternatively, the VA will have to squeeze its other programs.

The Denver hospital is hardly the only extravagantly bungled VA construction project. A Government Accountability Office audit found what the Washington Post described as "extravagant planning divorced from financial reality and bungled execution" at several projects.

This comes on top of the last year's scandal about deadly delays and active attempts to cover them up by VA administrators, which seems to undermine Krugman's other claim about the "rising quality."

The idea that the government can do things better and more efficiently than the private sector is a favorite claim of the single-payer crowd. Krugman said once the private insurance market "has huge administrative costs and has no demonstrated ability to reduce other costs."

He and others routinely compare Medicare's allegedly low overhead costs with the private sector's.

This claim ignores one inconvenient fact. Without the disciplining force of market competition, the government gets lazy, inefficient, careless and corrupt.

It's why the VA — despite huge increases in its budget in recent years — still forces veterans to wait months for treatment, and can blow $100 million on a hospital atrium with curving walls and huge glass windows.

It's why Britain's National Health Service and Canada's single-payer system are riddled with deadly delays. And why the federal government managed to blow $2 billion on the still unfinished Healthcare.gov.

It's also why public transportation projects are always late and over budget. Why public schools can't seem to accomplish the one job they're paid handsomely to do — educate children. And it's why the DMV is never heralded for its superior customer service.

When you include the cost of waste and fraud, you'd be hard pressed to find any government program that runs as well as its private sector counterpart.

Unless, that is, you simply ignore all the bad stuff.

"In Britain," Krugman once wrote, "the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We've all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false."

Just as false as the horror stories about the VA?

Hat tip Investors Business Daily