So who really broke the VA? In sum, it's a failure with many silent fathers.

President Obama

Obama's experience with the VA is a testament to the danger of big promises—and high expectations.

He pledged to end the claims backlog while simultaneously making a string of moves that summoned a flood of new claims to the agency.

The administration made it easier for veterans to get compensation for both post-traumatic stress disorder and exposure to Agent Orange—a Vietnam War-era defoliant now tied to a long list of neurological disorders. Those moves extended help to long-suffering veterans, but they weren't matched by the VA reforms needed to adequately address the new claims. Agent Orange alone took up 37 percent of the Veterans Benefits Administration's claims-processing resources nationally from October 2010 to March 2012, according to a Government Accountability Office report.

And as claims soared during Obama's first years in office, so did wait times. In 2009, there were about 423,000 claims at the VA, with 150,000 claims pending for more than four months (the official wait time it takes a claim to be considered "backlogged"). By 2012, claims had exploded to more than 883,000—and 586,540 of those sat on the agency's backlog list.

The administration did request—and get from Congress—additional funding for the agency. The agency's budget totaled $100 billion in 2009. In 2014, it was up to $154 billion. But that money doesn't instantly transfer into an expanded capacity to meet veterans' needs: It takes approximately two years to fully train a claims worker; the blame for the staff crunch doesn't rest on Obama's shoulders alone.

The influx of claims has since fallen, and the backlog is greatly diminished—though there is controversy over how the administration has dealt with the claims. (For more on the administration's struggle to fix the VA, see here.)

"As a candidate, Barack Obama promised veterans the moon, but in many cases he hasn't delivered as president," said Republican Representative Jeff Miller of Florida, the chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee. "VA's disability claims backlog grew to historic levels on his watch .… Candidate Obama promised the most transparent administration in history, but his VA is a case study in how to stonewall the press, the public, and Congress."

Congress

Miller's own branch of government, however, cannot claim clean hands.

The VA could be overhauled to better address the needs of modern veterans, including reforms to the way it processes claims, assesses the performance of its employees, and measures its overall performance. But putting many of those reforms in place would require an act of Congress—and thus far those haven't happened.

Instead, Congress has taken a more reactive approach. When incidents—such as the recent hospital deaths—capture public attention, lawmakers hold hearings where they berate agency officials with juicy sound bites they can later play back for their constituents. It's good political theater, but it's unclear that the payoff is anything other than political.