I'm not a VA member. I have close family who are though. And I hear the same kind of complaints from them as I do from family members with Kaiser.

Mostly around availability of specialists. Things like not being able to schedule an appointment with a Kaiser GI doctor for 6 months, but they wouldn't approve going to an outside doctor without going through some kind of byzantine appeals process.

As far as the studies go, I was originally posting them in response to the OP's claim that VA hospitals are "notorious horror shows", which implies things like botched surgeries.