Source Of VA Scandal: Barackracy

     United States veterans and other concerned Americans can rest easy, Barack Obama has vented his anger over the shabby way in which veterans were treated at the Phoenix VA, and ostensibly other facilities across the country. And once our current president publicly decries a scandal with his fully-bloomed disgust and antipathy, heads roll and reforms are made at a dizzying pace. Barack Obama and his outrage have solved scandalous behavior by myriad government bureaucrats from Benghazi to the IRS, or at least that is what he has convinced his legions of woefully uniformed voters.
     Truth be told, which is an impossibility for this president, the scandalous behavior from the Veterans Administration is the direct result of Obama policy. When Mr. Obama slithered into the Oval Office in January of 2009, he said he was going to streamline the care received by our nation's heroes at Veterans Administration facilities throughout the country. Little did we know this meant giving bonuses to bureaucrats for wait listing veterans, many of whom died waiting for an appointment just to allow administrators to meet their goals.
     The Veterans Administration has metastasized with the addition of 100 thousand new employees over the last ten years. Some would say this is a result of the number of veterans being treated having nearly doubled in the same time period. But the new hires at the VA have almost entirely been administrators and other bureaucrats, not actual medical professionals who treat our nation's heroes. In the Phoenix facility, which has recently been exposed as the poster child of Obama policy, fifty nine percent of its budget is spent on administration, not on medical care for veterans.
     Bonuses given to administrators for short shrifting veterans' care is only one problem with the Obama policy. The other is regulations which severely limit the number of patients doctors can minister to in a single day, especially specialists who see the more severe cases. Some doctors are limited by Obama money-saving policies to only seeing 2 or 3 patients a day. The limiting of participation by health care providers at VA facilities, and the seemingly unlimited expansion of number-crunching, pencil-pushing bureaucrats is illustrative of the Leftist ethos which values bureaucracy over competence.
     The real problem with the Veterans Administration is that it is a cabinet position. Any function once exclusively within the purview of the states, being raised in political stature by being made a cabinet position with a secretary, budget, and put under federal control, loses its ability to function for the good of the citizen. Veterans should be given vouchers to receive care at any private facility of their choice and not be herded like cattle into the government slaughterhouse. By the way, no one has ever been held accountable in the many scandals over which President Obama has been outraged, concluding that he is either the most unconcerned president in history, or the most powerless.