Health Care BS

Dean Barnet is indisputably correct when he writes:

What happened at Walter Reed is a national disgrace, and leaves an unerasable blemish on the Bush administration. To pretend otherwise would do a disservice to our returning soldiers who have suffered at Walter Reed.

However, to turn this into yet another shrill debate about Bush is to completely miss the point. This story is shaping up like the Katrina disaster, in which the real issue—the breathtaking inefficiency of a government bureaucracy called FEMA—was obscured by idiotic arguments about how much the President cared about African-Americans living in New Orleans. Likewise, Walter Reed’s true ailment—bureaucratic inefficiency again—may well remain untreated because the scandal is yet another opportunity to debate the merits of the Bush presidency. But not everything is about Bush.What we need to be focusing on here are the lessons Walter Reed teaches us about government-run health care operations.