During a town hall event in New York City last week, democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) claimed that the Department of Veterans Affairs “provides the highest quality care to our veterans” and slammed those who want to “optimize” the VA, saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Meghan McCain, daughter of late-Sen. John McCain and co-host of “The View,” responded by pointing to the veterans who have “literally died” waiting to get treatment from the scandal-ridden VA.
“The idea that this thing that isn’t broken, this thing that provides the highest quality care to our veterans somehow needs to be fixed, optimized, tinkered with until you don’t even recognize it anymore,” Ocasio-Cortez said in comments reported by The Washington Free Beacon. “Here’s the thing, they are trying to fix it, but who are they trying to fix it for is the question we’ve got to ask. They’re trying to fix the VA for pharmaceutical companies, they’re trying to fix the VA for insurance corporations, and ultimately they’re trying to fix the VA for a for-profit healthcare industry that does not put people or veterans first.”
“We have a responsibility to protect it, because if it is any community that deserves Cadillac first-class healthcare in the United States of America it is our military service members,” the congresswoman declared.
The Daily Wire’s Ryan Saavedra tweeted out a clip of the comments, writing, “Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) claims that the VA provides the ‘highest quality of [health]care’ to veterans, says: ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.'”
In response, McCain, whose father was a strong advocate for veterans, wrote, “Veterans have literally died waiting to get health care treatment from the VA….died!”
As Saavedra points out in his report on Ocasio-Cortez’s comments, the VA healthcare system has come under scrutiny over the past few years amid a series of reports about ultimately deadly “secret waiting lists,” cover-ups, and other alarming administrative failures. In 2014, CNN reported that “at least 40 U.S. veterans died waiting for appointments at the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care system, many of whom were placed on a secret waiting list.” Around 1,700 veterans were waiting an average of 115 days to see a doctor at the facility.
The fatal Phoenix mismanagement was not an isolated incident. “Sadly, the situation was not limited to the Phoenix facility: there was gross mismanagement of a gastroenterology program in South Carolina, and a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in Pittsburgh that killed six vets,” The Hill reports. “The VA’s culture, investigators discovered, was rife with false record-keeping. President Obama’s secretary of Veterans Affairs, Gen. Eric Shinseki, resigned and his replacement, former Procter & Gamble CEO Robert McDonald, quickly implemented management reforms modeled on private-sector practices.”
In an op-ed for Forbes last year, Dr. Robert Pearl, who did his residency training at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, explains that “lengthy wait times for treatment have become the norm inside many of the nation’s 1,243 VA facilities, particularly those located in rural areas.”
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