No, Mr President, the problem with VA is not its computers

Barack Obama is certainly the most audacious if not the most creative liar to grace the White House in some time. While trying to explain his and former Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki's inability to deliver a minimum of competence in the management of the VA he wandered off on an extremely ludicrous tangent. The root of all the trouble was outdated computer systems. Presumably the department's computers are beyond the Secretary's purview so there was no one like the ever competent Kate Sebelius to keep an eye on the software.

I just was talking to Rob Nabors, and he described to me, for example, just in very specific detail, how in some of these facilities you've got computer systems for scheduling that date back to the ‘90s; situations in which one scheduler might have to look at four or five different screens to figure out where there's a slot and where there might be a doctor available; situations in which they're manually passing requests for an appointment over to somebody else, who's then inputting them. Right? So you have in many cases old systems, broken-down systems.

Not exactly. The scheduling software in question is VistA and while it was developed and deployed in the '90s  it has been updated and revised and may be one of VA's more positive innovations. There is a new os in the visage called HealtheVet but on the the VA's web site, on a page updated March 4 of this year the Department still lauds VistA.

Each month, VistA Imaging:
Serves more than 1.3 million patients.
Captures more than 39 million new images.
Displays 9 - 11 million images for review.
Displays about 550,000 studies for diagnosis and is used to interpret more than 160,000 studies.

Compared to healthcare.gov I would say that's pretty damn good. The Wikipedia entry on VistA which one must assume was written by someone at VA states;

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has had automated data processing systems, including extensive clinical and administrative capabilities, within its medical facilities since before 1985.[7] Initially called the Decentralized Hospital Computer Program (DHCP) information system, DHCP was enshrined as a recipient of the Computerworld Smithsonian Award for best use of Information Technology in Medicine in 1995.
VistA supports both ambulatory and inpatient care, and includes several significant enhancements to the original DHCP system. The most significant is a graphical user interface for clinicians known as the Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS), which was released in 1997. In addition, VistA includes computerized order entry, bar code medication administration, electronic prescribing, and clinical guidelines.

With friends like Obama the VA has no need of enemies. He slandered about the only thing in the department that works. He should get his head out of his ass.