When Congress began to debate the Affordable Care Act, I was asked by a wide range of people what I thought of the President’s proposed healthcare overhaul. My response then, as now, was very brief. Today, as scandals within the VA Medical System continue to surface, I believe that my response has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“We do not need to experiment with universal healthcare coverage,” I would tell the folks asking me about the Affordable Care Act. “We have a model in place now and it is failing the Americans who utilize it and costing the taxpayers exorbitant sums of money to provide sub-standard service. If you think this is a good idea, why don’t you ask someone who utilizes the VA Medical System? No, I do not believe we need to replicate the VA on a grander scale; it will fail.”

We now know that the months it takes to see a VA doctor, the poor service, the delays in follow-up appointments, the employee grievances, and a host of other issues have been disastrous for the Veterans who use the VA healthcare system.

Arizona’s Veteran population is approximately 527,400 out of more than 6.5 million people.  This is roughly 8% of Arizona’s population, slightly higher than the 7% of Veterans in the national population. As of the 2010 census, however, the population of Americans wearing a uniform, including Guard and Reservists, represented less than 1% of the US Population.

This is where the storyline gets very disturbing. A large percentage of the Veteran population fought in previous conflicts like World War II and Korea. These elderly Veterans are dying in large numbers and are not being replaced at nearly the same rate. But, despite the shrinking Veteran population, the VA budget has increased 67% and the department itself has tripled in size since the beginning of the Afghanistan Conflict. Further, only around half of all eligible Veterans utilize the VA system. So how can the VA Medical System be so heavily burdened?

Somehow the VA has actually found a way to become less efficient, while serving a smaller population, with more money.

Unfortunately, I have personally become all too familiar with the travesties that surround the VA Medical System. Several weeks ago, I was in Washington, D.C. meeting with legislators and their staff expressing concerns on these very issues. At the time, we were using the Atlanta VA Hospital, which ranks 5th nationally for death-related payouts, and the Pittsburgh VA director, who received bonuses in the wake of a Legionella Outbreak in his hospital, as examples of the rampant failure within the VA. We were not lobbying for more money, more benefits, or sweetheart deals. We were simply urging Congress to give the Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs the ability to cut through the bureaucracy and fire individuals who are detrimental to the VA and the Veterans they serve.

As an Arizonan and a Veteran, you can only imagine how troubling it was to find the Phoenix VA Hospital in the news shortly after I returned to Arizona from D.C. I hope that through this tragedy we are finally able to reform the VA Medical System so this never happens again. To that end, I am extremely proud of the journalists and my fellow Vets who have kept the Phoenix VA fiasco at the forefront of the national debate; we are using this tragedy as a wake-up call to Congress and the American public. The failures of the VA must be fixed, and Phoenix is ground zero. We refuse to accept apathy of bureaucrats as an excuse.

So when will we start asking the right questions in regard to our healthcare system? If the VA Medical System, which services a fraction of the entire U.S. population, is this flawed, broken, and full of corruption, how can the Affordable Care Act work? At this point, who in their right mind can argue that it can?

Here’s a novel approach:  let’s fix the smaller VA Medical System before we roll out a full-scale, mandatory universal healthcare system.