Sound familiar? It should. That’s the story of President Warren Harding and Charles Forbes, the man Harding chose as the first head of the Veterans Bureau. From the start, the Veterans Bureau was corrupt and mismanaged. Government was not capable of sound administration in the 1920s, under President Harding, and not much has improved ninety years later under President Obama. The fraud at Veterans Affairs then and now may be a foreshadowing of government-run health care for the nation.
The idea of hospital care for veterans began after World War I. Before that, war veterans received small pensions if they could show they were injured in military service to the point they could not do their civilian jobs. The American Legion became a powerful lobby after WWI, and free health care for vets became a reality in the 1920s. A more financially sound idea for providing medical care would have been to give vouchers to veterans for medical services at existing hospitals. But politicians saw advantages to setting up special veterans’ hospitals in their political districts–Congressmen, under a system of government-run hospitals, could take credit with voters for building new hospitals locally for veterans.
The good intentions of medical help for veterans turned into scandal and fraud right from the start. President Harding and the many supporters of the new veterans’ hospitals did not understand that new incentives were in place for corruption, not health care. Lt. Col. Charles Forbes, the new head of the Veterans Bureau, won the Distinguished Service Medal in WWI. But once in power in government, he and his friends made millions of dollars from selling high priced land for the new hospitals, and then overcharging to build them.
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