Letter: Outsourcing to blame for poor health care

Sunday, March 11, 2007 | 7:42 a.m.

Lee S. Gliddon Jr., in his March 9 letter, "Public health care mired in red tape," opines wrongly on the tragedy of health care for military personnel. Mr. Gliddon blames the problems at Walter Reed hospital on government-provided health care, but he has missed a tiny fact.

As reported widely in other newspapers, Walter Reed's administrative services have been outsourced by the Bush administration. Care to guess to whom? A company called IAP.

This is the same company that failed miserably at providing ice to refugees of Hurricane Katrina, the same company being run by former executives from Kellogg, Brown and Root. This company in turn is a subsidiary of Halliburton. I wonder how this happened?

Perhaps Mr. Gliddon might want to actually read reputable sources and then form an opinion. What he is doing is forming an opinion and then ignoring inconvenient facts that disprove his opinion - in this case assuming the magic of the marketplace will fix issues that marketplace has actually caused.

He should stop misleading the public on this topic based on his obtuse ideology that private, for-profit health care is better than government health care. This is tragically wrong for all vets who are victims of a for-profit outsourcing scheme.

Mark Schaffer, Las Vegas