In Canada, by contrast, the doctors and hospitals tend to be private. The government pays, and sets price schedules, but they don't directly control care.
It's obviously a bit more complicated than that, but the public system sounds much less centralized than your VA health system.
However, the jump from that to asserting that it's the "public" part of that statement that leads to the "terrible" part is a huge one, and frankly not in evidence.
We've already got at least a Medicaid system by state, federal Medicare, and federal VA. Are any of these non-terrible? Is there any realistic reform towards making them non-terrible? Is it realistically feasible to scale any of the non-terrible ones up to service the whole US population?
Certainly, it's possible for a government run healthcare system to not be terrible (or at least, mostly not terrible; any healthcare system has to make some hard choices at times, and people don't usually like it when they're the hard choice), and I'm sure you can find examples of that; but it doesn't seem possible with the governments the US has.
I'm not convinced that it isn't possible to scale up to the entire US population in a way that doesn't suck, but you could be right. To work well it would certainly involve systemic change across the healthcare industry, and some current players would be hurt. Perhaps it's not politically feasible in the US, but if so that is a pretty damning indictment of the state of things.
Hmmm, it sounds more like a terrible implementation, whereas some of the other implementations are generally decent?
Knowing what I know of the VA and my former service roommate’s experiences with them, I can’t really blame people for thinking any such system run by our government expanded to more people would never be efficient or better. Something something better the devil you know...