In an op-ed last week for Defense One, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees union warned ominously of profiteers seeking to take over veterans' healthcare.

In his essay, David Cox blithely dismisses the many scandals festering at the Department of Veterans' Affairs, claiming that the VA has been subjected to "an unprecedented smear campaign" intended to help "political insiders and corporate funders" make money by providing private insurance to veterans.

Private insurance or privatization may or may not be the best option for helping veterans. That's for Congress to decide. But a private option, or even outright privatization, cannot be any worse than what veterans have suffered at the VA's hands in recent years.

Whether the VA and its bureaucracy are up to the task of providing healthcare of sufficient quality is a settled question. They cannot do it.

Through several separate scandals in the last two years, they have proven themselves not just incompetent, but vicious, malevolent and self-dealing on a level seldom witnessed even within the ranks of the federal bureaucracy, which is saying something.

Their health appointment scheduling scam, the most pervasive and highest profile scandal of late, provides just one example of how VA employees looked out for themselves at the expense of veterans.

At more than 100 different VA health facilities, they deliberately manipulated the way appointments were entered into the agency's computer system so it appeared that veterans' requests were being delivered promptly.

This allowed them to collect performance bonuses, even as veterans languished with unreasonably long waits to see a doctor, some of them even dying before they could get care. VA employees who came forward with this information were hit with classic bureaucratic retaliation.

This sort of sneaky behavior is not limited to rank-and-file bureaucrats. The administration's internal watchdog was accused last year of covering up an even more dangerous scam.

VA doctors at an Illinois facility were found to have falsified records to make it look like they had performed procedures when they had not. Others even performed medically unnecessary heart surgeries on veterans, again apparently so that they would be able to collect productivity bonuses.

At the same facility, heart patients' echocardiograms went unread for months or years, so patients' conditions worsened. The surgeon who blew the whistle on this unconscionable behavior had to quit her job after her supervisors, as per the usual VA procedure, retaliated against her.

Another scandal pertains to the grave neglect with which benefit applications from recent combat veterans have been handled. The agency has left tens of thousands of applications to rot, claiming that information about applicants' income (which combat veterans are not required to provide) is missing.

Still another scandal, from earlier, has to do with coverups of infectious outbreaks at VA facilities. Many of the administrators responsible were rewarded with large bonuses.

There's also the issue of massive cost overruns at VA construction sites, the waste of millions of taxpayer dollars on artwork (including one particularly expensive piece at a facility for the blind) and VA employees stealing money from taxpayers, which they have then been allowed to keep (along with their jobs).

The despair that the VA system has created is worsened by the fact that no one is held accountable. Every time the VA claims it has fired employees who engaged in misconduct, it turns out they actually haven't.

It only makes matters worse that the cabinet secretary specifically brought in to fix the agency instead tries to downplay it. These bureaucrats have each other's backs, even if one them gets arrested for committing violent crimes outside of work, in a way that no private company would tolerate.

In his op-ed, Cox wrings his hands over pernicious profiteers looking to make money from veterans' suffering. But how else can anyone describe the actions of well-paid bureaucrats whose job performance appears to be a case of theft from taxpayers at veterans' expense?

Millions of people have good private insurance today through their employers. If Congress were to disband the VA and simply purchase insurance for every eligible veteran, the experience of these brave men and women would almost certainly be improved.