Ken Nelson

The rage du jour (and I mean that in the best possible sense) today is the “Your Life Your Choices” booklet the Veterans Administration wants its doctors to have their patients use as a living will.

I’m all  for living wills. But the VA booklet is a push poll towards choosing death. It isn’t the “thank you” our veterans deserve.

All the pundits I saw this weekend missed the entire point.  They worried about the politics and the timing and the Obama camps lame attempt to white wash that they reintroduced the document after Bush had banned it.

Those “gotcha” things, while interesting, miss the entire reason this episode is so important.

The VA is a bureaucracy of about 300,000 people.  It has 2 and 5 years “budgets” that it has to meet, but wants to grow.  How does it do this?  It tries to sway its “expensive’ patients to not be so darned expensive. One route is to get them to choose death with a clever push poll that might sway decisions almost sub-consciously – thus giving them a budget win but no big fight.

With the Democrats poised to give us ALL a similar bureaucracy to fight, the real lesson is in how larger bureaucracies operate and what incents them.   Unfortunately, your life isn’t what they will be rewarded for.