I got an email back from him with respect to his thinking that it was, as Martha Stewart would say, "a good thing" if more American veterans were ignorant of their right to use VA hospitals. He says that it would be "a different thing" if the VA were proposing to save money by explicitly turning sick veterans away, rather than merely by "suspending marketing activities" so that more sick veterans would simply not show up in the first place.
I don't understand the logic: the government has a duty to inform people of its programs and of their rights under them. It doesn't seem to matter whether the program is cutback through explicit rationing or through defaulting on the government's duty to inform. It's kind of like saying that it's a bad thing to tell someone "this costs $8, and you gave me $20, but I'm only going to give you $7 in change," but that it's a good thing to tell someone "this costs $8, and you gave me $20, $9 (handing him $1), $10 (handing him another $1)--look! A walrus!--$20 (handing him a $5)."
There's an implicit subtext--well, maybe not implicit--that if people are too... something... to find out about the VA hospital system on their own, they don't deserve medical care. It seems--like so many other neoconservatives--that Kaus's ethical position is that of the bandit leader in "The Magnificent Seven": "if God had not meant them to be sheared, he would not have made them sheep."
Brad DeLong