How union leaders have added to the VA crisis

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, or VA, is coming under fire for providing poor care to veterans who rely on it. Wait lists for essential medical procedures have extended for months, and veterans of the armed forces have lost their lives as a result. Administrators at VA hospitals have made matters worse by faking...

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, or VA, is coming under fire for providing poor care to veterans who rely on it. Wait lists for essential medical procedures have extended for months, and veterans of the armed forces have lost their lives as a result. Administrators at VA hospitals have made matters worse by faking records to hide the wait times.

The VA is badly run, but there’s another factor contributing to the crisis.

The American Federation of Government Employees, or AFGE, has been digging in to make government health programs more expensive and less productive for years.

National Review magazine is reporting that the VA spent more than $13 million on 251 salaried employees who performed union work full time rather than tending to patients in 2012. This included 174 nurses, physical therapists and other health-care specialists who otherwise might have cared for veterans, making the waitlists shorter.

The Phoenix VA system, which has come under especially sharp attention for severely long wait times, had two full-time employees working on union matters. The Baltimore system, which has the longest wait times in the VA, had half a dozen workers doing union business, at a cost to taxpayers of $372,674.

While AFGE is drawing valuable personnel out of the VA’s core health care system, it is also working to prevent veterans from finding care outside of the VA. AFGE has been a tenacious opponent of referring VA patients to private hospitals, or any other measure that would privatize the VA’s operations. AFGE’s simple solution to the VA’s problems is to spend more money on the VA system and hire more staff.

Whether hiring more staff at the VA will ultimately work out well for veterans who need health care is debatable – much would depend on how many of the new employees wind up doing union work, among other things. But bigger payrolls at the VA would definitely work out to the benefit of AFGE’s top officials: the national union alone collects $237 every year from each member ($19.75 per month), and that does not include additional dues charged by AFGE locals.

Aside from arguing against privatizing, and calling for more hiring, it has yet to be seen what AFGE has done to uncover poor care or waste at VA hospitals.

Whenever government union officials call for more spending or more hiring to solve problems in government programs, taxpayers and voters should always ask two questions:

First, how much does the union stand to make in extra dues?

And second, what has the union been willing to do, on its own initiative, to solve the problem?

The first question goes directly to the pecuniary interest that government union officials have in expanding government in general. The second goes to whether they can be believed when they say they care about veterans, or the poor, or whatever other group that government programs are supposed to serve.

Often the answer to these questions will show that while most government employees’ hearts are in the right place, government union leaders are often more motivated by the money that their union can take in than by caring for the poor, the disabled or veterans of the armed forces.

Veterans would be better served by moving those VA employees who work on union business back into health-care work, and by government officials giving veterans vouchers allowing them to go to private hospitals for the care they need.