NT Times: "Trust us: Socialized medical care is the absolute *best*!"

It's SO funny when Nobel prize winners and other self-styled "elites" make some big pronouncements only to have reality show 'em to be utterly full of crap.  Case in point:  NY Times writers like Paul Krugman.

Three years ago Krugman praised the VA for proving that having the government run medical care was a “huge success story”:

"Multiple surveys have found the VHA providing better care than most Americans receive, even as the agency has held cost increases well below those facing Medicare and private insurers…the VHA is an integrated system, which provides health care as well as paying for it. So it’s free from the perverse incentives created when doctors and hospitals profit from expensive tests and procedures, whether or not those procedures actually make medical sense."

Krugman added, “Yes, this is ‘socialized medicine’…But it works, and suggests what it will take to solve the troubles of US health care more broadly.”

Similarly, in 2009 Timesman Nicholas Kristof wrote:

Take the hospital system run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the largest integrated health system in the United States. It is fully government run, much more “socialized medicine” than is Canadian health care with its private doctors and hospitals. And the system for veterans is by all accounts one of the best-performing and most cost-effective elements in the American medical establishment.

But really, citizen, health care works best when government runs it.  Trust us--we're reeeally smaht.