"Nobody's been in a military hospital before?!" my wife remarked when she read this Deseret News article. Of course she's had twenty plus years experience with military care and is married to a man born in an Air Force hospital (my parents tell me it was more like a quonset hut).

It was inevitable once the problems at Walter Reed made the news that the other horror stories would crop up. I imagine every US military hospital commander and VA adminstrator around the world began scrambling when the initial WaPo story hit the newstands.

Much of the care we recieved was fine, but there was the occasional screw-up. More challenging were the idiotic bureaucratic issues to deal with. The exposure will be good, even if the motive of the press corps and Congress is more to skewer President Bush than help the troops. Lets just call that the positive side-effect of Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Oh - you wonder what socialized medicine looks like but can't afford to drive to Canada to take a peek? Just drop by your local VA hospital. I'm sure they won't mind.