AOC Says VA Isn't Broke, Shouldn't Be Fixed While Veterans Are Dying Waiting for Health Care
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said a lot of dumb things. Whether it was not knowing the difference between red and blue states or being completely unable to answer basic questions about her views, the 29-year-old “Democratic socialist” seems to have a knack for acting clueless.
But she may have just outdone herself. A new clip of the New York representative is so jaw-dropping that it would be absolutely hilarious, except for the fact that some of America’s best citizens are being impacted by her ignorance.
On Monday, journalist Ryan Saavedra posted a video of Ocasio-Cortez basically waving away problems within the Veteran’s Administration and scolding the people who have called for repairing the many problems within the troubled VA.
Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) claims that the VA provides the “highest quality of [health]care” to veterans, says: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” pic.twitter.com/bYFEprdYRS
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) April 22, 2019
“Especially when it comes to the VA, all I can think of is that classic refrain that my parents always told me growing up. Which is that ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’” the congresswoman declared during an event in New York.
Come again? Does Ocasio-Cortez truly believe that a federal agency that has been plagued with problems for years “ain’t broke”? If there was any doubt that this was what she was saying, the representative repeated the claim as she continued rambling.
“And — exactly, don’t fix it,” she continued, still talking about the scandal-ridden VA. “The idea that this thing that isn’t broken, this thing that provides the highest quality care to our veterans somehow needs to be fixed, optimized, tinkered with, until — until we don’t even recognize it anymore.”
Yes, Ocasio-Cortez just declared that in her world, the VA isn’t broken and provides the best care possible to veterans and trying to fix or optimize it would be terrible. You just can’t make this stuff up.
The socialist representative might not have noticed because she was too busy bartending, but problems at the VA have literally killed American veterans. That isn’t an exaggeration.
“We are talking about an agency that is still reeling from a scandal wherein ailing veterans died waiting to get the health care that was promised to them when the joined the armed forces,” Becket Adams pointed out in The Washington Examiner.
“As many as 307,000 veterans died awaiting medical attention, according to a 2015 VA’s inspector general report,” Adams continued.
Although some of those problems were addressed, others remain. Just this past March, the Government Accountability Office found that the VA is a “High Risk” agency with a high chance of “fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement.”
“We keep finding the same problems over and over,” Comptroller General of the United States Gene Dodaro testified to Congress about the VA.
Maybe the same staff members who explained red and blue states to Ocasio-Cortez were the ones who briefed her about the Veteran’s Administration. Or, more likely, maybe she’s just so far detached from reality that she has no idea about the struggles of U.S. veterans and doesn’t particularly care to find out.
People like Ocasio-Cortez always seem to act as if they’re the first to discover anything. History begins with them, at least in their own minds. So socialism is a cool new idea that has never been tried before, money is seemingly unlimited and magical, and the VA is the most efficient government agency in America.
The real irony to all this is that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is actually pretty good advice, except Ocasio-Cortez is doing the exact opposite. She’s ignoring real problems like the VA scandals while insisting on “fixing” — or wrecking — the components that have made America great.
She’s content to just shrug when agencies like the VA are indeed broken, while crusading to completely upend the United States economy and its infrastructure in her far-left image. It’s as if we’ve entered a carnival hall of mirrors; up is down and backward is forward.
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