The cure for what ails the VA:
If you have a sclerotic hospital system on which everyone else has given up, the solution is Dr. Ramanathan Raju, currently the head of the public hospital system in New York but previously chief executive of the Cook County Health and Hospitals System. No one in Chicago public life gets an A-plus from everyone, but doctors, politicians and journalists alike agree that Dr. Raju took a failing system and turned it around: re-imagining its role in a changed health care landscape while dealing with its day-to-day personnel and quality issues. The improvement has been dramatic and rapid: though Dr. Raju was only in place for two years (much to our dismay), the improvement in the Cook County public health system is obvious to all.
Hire Dr. Raju to fix the V.A. He’s never met a bureaucracy he couldn’t tame.
(I don’t know him personally and certainly have not solicited his permission to recommend him. In fact, he was eager to return to his family in New York, which would probably not welcome his leaving again for Washington-but, when duty calls . . . )