Senator Clinton is going to mark Veterans Day today by plumping for an increase in funding for Veterans Administration hospitals in the city. A wire from her of fice says that she will join the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association to discuss the flawed national formula for allocating funds to V.A. Hospitals. She will also outline legislation that would fix the formula and more federal dollars to aid New York’s V.A. Hospitals. While we share Mrs. Clinton’s concern for the health care for veterans and for the principle of making sure the country stands by its veterans, the more forward-looking approach to the prob lem is through a pilot program that would supply veterans with health care vouchers.

This idea is starting to be talked about as a way to give veterans greater control over their health care and get them out of the V.A. bureaucracy. The V.A. Hospital system does a good job in some areas, but it confronts veterans with huge waits for medical care or visits to doctors that are more or less routine in the private sector. A voucher system is designed to give veterans a choice as to where they go for care. It is being opposed by a variety of labor and veterans groups. As the American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO, put it, “The medical care and treatment of veterans, like the administration of other benefits and services owed veterans, is an inherent responsibility of the Federal government — not the private sector.”

But this kind of ideological opposition to veterans health allowances, as the idea of veterans health vouchers is sometimes called, doesn’t address the problems veterans face in getting routine care from V.A. Hospitals or the drain that routine care places on the V.A. system itself. As the Scripps Howard columnist Deroy Murdock put it in a column a year ago, “The G.I. Bill of Rights did not ‘abandon’ the Greatest Generation by letting them study wherever they wanted.” Opposition to the idea of health vouchers for veterans is of a piece with opposition to vouchers for education and pollution. It stems from a hostility to individuals making decisions for themselves — i.e. having choices. A press conference on Veterans Day is good for a headline or two, but if Mrs. Clinton and her colleagues really have the veterans’ interests in mind as much as they claim, they’ll work to give them as much room to maneuver in the search for medical care as ordinary civilians enjoy.