The Veterans Administration is preparing to significantly change the way that our veterans recieve health care. The agency is planning to redirect billions of dollars from government run facilities into the private health care sector.

Under proposed guidelines, it would be easier for veterans to receive care in privately run hospitals and have the government pay for it. Veterans would also be allowed access to a system of proposed walk-in clinics, which would serve as a bridge between V.A. emergency rooms and private providers, and would require co-pays for treatment. Veterans’ hospitals, which treat seven million patients annually, have struggled to see patients on time in recent years, hit by a double crush of returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and aging Vietnam veterans. A scandal over hidden waiting lists in 2014 sent Congress searching for fixes, and in the years since, Republicans have pushed to send veterans to the private sector, while Democrats have favored increasing the number of doctors in the V.A. If put into effect, the proposed rules — many of whose details remain unclear as they are negotiated within the Trump administration — would be a win for the once-obscure Concerned Veterans for America, an advocacy group funded by the network founded by the billionaire industrialists Charles G. and David H. Koch, which has long championed increasing the use of private sector health care for veterans.

Is this good news for our veterans? Clearly, something had to be done to reform a system that was failing to deliver timely and quality health care to our veterans. The VA's failures have been an ongoing travesty and government interia only made the problems worse.

But some Republicans are concerned. It is likely that private care for veterans will be more expensive than government and that there is less oversight in sending veterans to private facilities. This presents greater opportunities for fraud and abuse of the system. There is also the issue of finding competent doctors to treat military-specific conditions like PTSD and injuries most doctors don't see in the private sector.

The VA's dismal performance in recent years makes those concerns almost trivial. It's unknown how many veterans have died as a result of being on waiting lists for years, but the number is significant. There is a feeling that if the VA can't deliver basic services in a timely manner to all veterans, reaching out to the private sector is the only option.

Few advocates want the VA completely privatized. But this change should go a long way toward addressing some of the problems that have plagued the agency for at least the last decade.