My father died last year at the ripe old age of 86 and spent plenty of time negotiating the halls of the Tucson Veterans Administration (VA) for various ailments he suffered later in life. He was entitled to VA treatment after his service during the War to Save Josef Stalin when he was posted to Germany just before the end of the conflict. These WWII vets are dropping like flies and it won't be long before few are even wandering the VA corridors much less this mortal coil.

My Dad did not die because of the VA directly and I suspect he was just ready to go and shift off to his reward. But I can count many times where was misdiagnosed mistaking congestive heart failure for pneumonia or assigning him a mountain of pills for which no one on Earth knows the complete side effects much less the rippling implications of mixing them together. He lived in spite of the VA and simply had a robust constitution.