Socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders accused the libertarian billionaire Koch brothers of being responsible for the scandalous Veterans Affairs backlog, which has caused an untold number of veterans to die while awaiting treatment from the massive medical bureaucracy.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, Sanders spoke Friday at a Massachusetts meeting headed by liberal journalist John Nichols. The senator — who identifies as an independent socialist but caucuses with the Democratic Party — largely excused the VA’s incompetence.
“Let me tell you some news,” he said. “The Veterans Administration provides very high-quality healthcare, period. It’s not perfect. It is good-quality healthcare according to the veterans themselves, and according to a number of independent surveys who have looked at it. It’s not perfect.”
Sanders linked the VA with a number of other “popular” federal bureaucracies. “The point is, you have government entities themselves — Social Security, enormously popular,” he said. “Medicare, enormously popular. Postal service, popular. VA, popular.”
“What are the problems?” he asked. “The problems is [sic] that all of these are large, governmental institutions. And you have folks out there now — Koch brothers and others — who want to radically change the nature of society, and either make major cuts in all of these institutions, or maybe do away with them entirely.”
Sanders did not explain how potential cuts in the future could impact the current performance of heavily-funded bureaucracies like the VA.
WATCH (video courtesy of Free Beacon):
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