THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

It must rank right up there with the election of Donald Trump as a truly horrible event in American government. The Veterans Administration hospital system was created to care for those who put their lives on the line for their country. It is now being threatened by those who ran away when their country called.

President Trump’s dismissal of David J. Shulkin, the secretary of veterans affairs — and the nomination of a Navy doctor with no known policy views to take his place — has brought renewed focus to an increasingly contentious debate over whether to give veterans the option of using the benefits they earned through military service to see private doctors rather than going to government hospitals and clinics.

The issue, which has pitted almost every major veterans group against Concerned Veterans for America, an advocacy group funded by the [evil] billionaire conservative brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch, and its allies, has been at the center of months of intrigue at the sprawling Department of Veterans Affairs, which is charged with caring for the United States’ 20 million veterans.

But Mr. Shulkin’s departure and the abrupt elevation of Dr. Ronny L. Jackson, the White House physician, to the department’s top job on Wednesday have raised new fears among Democrats and groups like the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion. They worry that the Trump administration will push for a major change in veterans’ health care that they have bitterly opposed.

The groups say the end result would be disastrous, effectively bleeding to death a network of 1,700 hospitals and clinics that has taken decades to build.

Dr. Shulkin, who was dismissed Wednesday evening by presidential tweet, argued in an op-ed article in The New York Times and in a subsequent interview on Thursday that such radical restructuring of veterans’ health care would not work.

He said that a middle path that he had tried to pursue — investing in the department’s own health care system while offering veterans more, though not unfettered, access to private doctors — had been rejected by Trump administration officials interested in rewarding private individuals and companies with a windfall in government money.

“They saw me as an obstacle to privatization who had to be removed,” he wrote in one of the most forceful statements offered yet by a fired Trump administration official.

Senior White House officials offered a different rationale for his firing that was based more on a damaging report about Dr. Shulkin’s use of government funds on a trip to Europe released last month than on a dispute over policy.

Lindsey Walters, a deputy White House press secretary, told reporters aboard Air Force One on Thursday that the nomination of Dr. Jackson should not be interpreted as a signal that Mr. Trump wants to privatize veterans’ health care.

But Mr. Trump seemed to renew those concerns just a short time later, promising in a speech in Ohio that he was going to ensure that veterans “have choice,” harkening back to a campaign promise to enact something like the Koch-backed plan.

Calls for privatization mean that a group of already rich people see a chance to get richer at government expense while delivering empty promises to those currently using the VA. With the current Republican chokehold on government there is a real chance the evil ones could do serious damage to s systen that so many rely on.