The VA system is only representing 1/3 of actual healthcare costs that vets are actually costing. That figure is then intentionally abused to represent that the VA system is less expensive. It's propaganda, nothing more.

> As long as total spending is unchanged there is no reason to suspect economic harm.

You mean other than the vast dislocation that health industry labor - and two dozen other industries reliant on that spending - would suffer? People taking pay cuts in healthcare, workers losing jobs in pharma & health insurance by the hundreds of thousands (high paying jobs at that). Your premise would only actually work that way in a simulation (and it'd be a really bad simulation, not accounting for anything in the real world), not in reality. In reality, there is dramatic economic friction that occurs when you fire someone and they have to retrain / find a new job, or when you cut their pay to bring costs in line. There are immense short-term and long-term costs to that upheaval, in reality. Such costs include: unemployment costs, job training, long-term unemployment costs, welfare benefit costs, tax base loss until jobs & incomes are recovered. The US economy is growing very slow, where's the evidence it can absorb such losses and then create a million new high paying jobs (simultaneously while automation is about to bear down on just about every category of employment)?