Is VA Care Still Better Than Anywhere?

[Mac1958]

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It's been my experience that regardless of the type of health care plan, one person may love VA or this doctor or this hospital or this clinic, and the next person will hate it. Health care is as personal as it gets, and your mileage may vary.

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[Howey]

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It's been my experience that regardless of the type of health care plan, one person may love VA or this doctor or this hospital or this clinic, and the next person will hate it. Health care is as personal as it gets, and your mileage may vary.

.

As the article states massive new hospitals and clinics were built during the Bush reign in northern red states that are empty because all the vets moved south. Obama's trying to build more, unfortunately that hard to do with the level of obstruction in the House.

 

[NoTeaPartyPleez]

How many civilians died waiting for private care in hospitals and from doctors last year? 200,000?

Something like that. I don't know what it will be like now but I personally have had a drastic reduction in my cost for Rx meds. Whoopee! Obamacare is workin' for me so far.

 

[NoTeaPartyPleez]

Is VA Care Still Better Than Anywhere?

Yup.

I have two brothers who are retired military and have had care through the VA for over 25 years. Never a complaint.

They get in to see their docs right away and they have great benefits, i.e. last year before Obamacare my brother and I both consulted docs for an inherited back problem. We were both prescribed physical therapy, and even received the same in-home exercise programs. But his coverage under the VA allowed for 40 visits to his P.T. Mine under Empire Blue covered 6.

Any other questions?

 

[Moonglow]

The VA I go to is great. Just had my annual last month and have another appointment on the 10th..Every time I needed hospital care they were there within seconds of pressing the button for a nurse. When I had my appendectomy in May of 2013 I was at a private hospital, after calling for a nurse they would show up maybe in 5-10 minutes..

 

[Quantum Windbag]

.

It's been my experience that regardless of the type of health care plan, one person may love VA or this doctor or this hospital or this clinic, and the next person will hate it. Health care is as personal as it gets, and your mileage may vary.

.

As the article states massive new hospitals and clinics were built during the Bush reign in northern red states that are empty because all the vets moved south. Obama's trying to build more, unfortunately that hard to do with the level of obstruction in the House.

Let me get this straight, they built a bunch of hospitals based on politics rather than need, and this somehow proves that the government is great at running health care.

Did I sum up your position?

 

[blackhawk]

Only if you can get it the VA may very we'll have great medical care but that doesn't help you if you can't get the appointment with them.

 

[Howey]

PART 2

In Part II, the author gives an example of a vet and what the process is. It's worth the read because many, many of the people on this forum are truly ignorant.

But here's the crux, and what I've been trying unsuccessfully to explain to ignorant people.

But let’s get real. The fundamental reason for the still huge backlog of cases does not lie with inefficiencies of the VA’s bureaucrats, most of whom are vets themselves. Nor does it come from an increase in the numbers of vets because, as explained in my last post, the number of veterans is actually shrinking dramatically. Rather, it fundamentally lies with the American people and their representatives in Congress, who despite all their fine talk about honoring those who have served their country, have tasked the VA with administering laws and regulations that presume most vets don’t deserve VA care unless they can prove otherwise.

It wasn’t always so. As I describe in my book, the Clinton Administration opened the doors to the VA in 1996 to anyone with an honorable discharge, and many folks who got in then remain grandfathered [that would be me]. But the Bush Administration slammed that door shut again in 2003, and while it has reopened a bit under Obama, we are still spending enormous resources enforcing policies designed to exclude most vets from VA care.

 

[Howey]

More, underscoring another of my points.

The New England Journal of Medicine is out this morning with a notable article on VA health care co-authored by Dr. Kenneth W. Kizer. As undersecretary for health during the Clinton administration, Kizer lead a quality transformation of VA health care that leaves him today one nation’s most respected voices in the movement for health care delivery system reform.

The quality of VA health care, as studies such as this one (pdf) attest, remains generally as good or better than what is found in the private sector. But the VA has lost some of its advantage over top-tier private integrated health care delivery systems, both because these providers are getting better, and because some VA hospitals have become quite uneven in their performance.

Kizer notes for example, that:

The Phoenix VA Medical Center — ground zero of the wait-time scandal — has mortality rates for common conditions that are among the highest within the VA and higher than those in many private hospitals. Its rates of catheter-related bloodstream infections are nearly three times the national average.

Sounds bad, huh? Read further...

Much of the idealism and innovation in the field that made VA such a bright star in health delivery system reform 10 years ago has been eroded by the reemergence of heavy-handed, centralized managerial control, concentrated in the hands of political appointees in Washington. This centralization is particularly true in the realm of digitalized medicine, where no longer are VA doctors and other frontline employees allowed to play the key role they once did in developing cutting edge applications of health IT. Most of the damage was done by the Bush administration, which did its best to reinvent the top-down hierarchal structure that had made the VA such a mediocre institution in the 1970s.

 

[Howey]

.

It's been my experience that regardless of the type of health care plan, one person may love VA or this doctor or this hospital or this clinic, and the next person will hate it. Health care is as personal as it gets, and your mileage may vary.

.

As the article states massive new hospitals and clinics were built during the Bush reign in northern red states that are empty because all the vets moved south. Obama's trying to build more, unfortunately that hard to do with the level of obstruction in the House.

Let me get this straight, they built a bunch of hospitals based on politics rather than need, and this somehow proves that the government is great at running health care.

Did I sum up your position?

Ya know...I used to think you were like a smarter [MENTION=1528]Yurt[/MENTION]. I'm now convinced you're a much dumber [MENTION=1322]007[/MENTION].

Just so I'm not ****** again...you left one word out above. Try to figure it out.

 

[Howey]

Only if you can get it the VA may very we'll have great medical care but that doesn't help you if you can't get the appointment with them.

You might want to read the thread and links before you spew any more stupid.

 

[Harry Dresden]

Why, yes! In one word, yes.

Well, yes, as the author of the title Best Care Anywhere, Why VA Health Care would be Better for Everyone, it’s been dispiriting to have it confirmed by a preliminary inspector general’s report that some frontline VA employees in Phoenix and elsewhere have been gaming a key performance metric regarding wait times. But what’s really has me enervated is how the dominate media narrative of the VA “scandal” has become so essentially misleading and damaging to the cause of health care delivery system reform...

...can we get clear on just what the underlying reality is? There is, to be sure, a systemic backlog of vets of all ages trying to establish eligibility for VA health care. This is due to absurd laws passed by Congress, which reflect on all us, that make veterans essentially prove that they are “worthy” of VA treatment (about which more later). But this backlog often gets confused with the entirely separate issue of whether those who get into system face wait times that are longer than what Americans enrolled in non-VA health care plans generally must endure.

Just what do we know about how crowded VA hospitals are generally? Here’s a key relevant fact that is just the opposite of what most people think. For all the wars we’ve been fighting, the veterans population has been falling sharply (pdf). Nationwide, their number fell by 17 percent between 2000 and 2014, primarily due to the passing of the huge cohorts of World War II- and Korea War-era vets. The decline has been particularly steep in California and throughout much of New England, the Mid-Atlantic and industrial Midwest, where the fall off has ranged between 21 percent and 36.7 percent.

Reflecting this decline, as well a general trend toward more outpatient services, many VA hospitals in these areas, including flagship facilities, want for nothing except sufficient numbers of patients to maintain their long-term viability. I have visited VA hospitals around the county and often been unnerved by how empty they are. When I visited two of the VA’s four state-of-the-art, breathtakingly advanced polytrauma units, in Palo Alto and Minneapolis, there was hardly a patient to be found.

But at the same time there is a comparatively small countertrend that results from large migrations of aging veterans from the Rust Belt and California to lower-cost retirement centers in the Sun Belt. And this flow, combined with more liberal eligibility standards that allow more Vietnam vets to receive VA treatment for such chronic conditions as ischemic heart disease and Parkinson’s, means that in some of these areas, such as, Phoenix, VA capacity is indeed under significant strain.

This regional imbalance in capacity relatively to demand makes it very difficult to manage the VA with system-wide performance metrics. Setting a benchmark of 14 days to see a new primary care doc at a VA hospital or clinic in Boston or Northern California may be completely reasonable. But trying to do the same in Phoenix and in a handful of other sunbelt retirement meccas is not workable without Congress ponying up for building more capacity there.

Once you have this background, it becomes easy to understand certain anomalies in this scandal. If care is really so bad, for example, why did all the major veterans services remain unanimous in recent testimony before Congress in their long-stranding praise for the quality of VA health care? And why have they remained stalwart in defending the VA against its many ideological enemies who want to see it privatized? It’s because, by and large, VA care is as good, if not better than what vets can find outside the system, including by such metrics as wait times.

Similarly, if VA care were not generally very good, the VA would not continue to rank extraordinarily high in independent surveys of patient satisfaction. Recently discharged VA hospital patients for example, rate their experience 4 points higher than the average (pdf) for the health care industry as a whole. Fully 96 percent say they would turn to VA inpatient care again.

Now if you go out looking for vets who say they have been victimized by the VA, you will have no trouble finding them, and many will be justified in their complaints. But as I’ll argue further in future posts, the key question to ask when confronting the real deficiencies of the VA is “compared to what?” Once that context is established, it becomes clear that VA as a whole continues to outperform the rest of the American health system, making its true lessons extremely important to learn.

The solution seem clear to me, but what are your ideas? Obviously, we don't want to dismantle something that's beloved by it's patients and is working so well....

ill take UCI Med Center or St Josephs Med Center any day over the VA Hospital in Long Beach.....and im willing to bet most Vets would too.....

 

[Peach]

I don't know, that is the most difficult question I have faced in a long time.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

PART 2

In Part II, the author gives an example of a vet and what the process is. It's worth the read because many, many of the people on this forum are truly ignorant.

But here's the crux, and what I've been trying unsuccessfully to explain to ignorant people.

But let’s get real. The fundamental reason for the still huge backlog of cases does not lie with inefficiencies of the VA’s bureaucrats, most of whom are vets themselves. Nor does it come from an increase in the numbers of vets because, as explained in my last post, the number of veterans is actually shrinking dramatically. Rather, it fundamentally lies with the American people and their representatives in Congress, who despite all their fine talk about honoring those who have served their country, have tasked the VA with administering laws and regulations that presume most vets don’t deserve VA care unless they can prove otherwise.

It wasn’t always so. As I describe in my book, the Clinton Administration opened the doors to the VA in 1996 to anyone with an honorable discharge, and many folks who got in then remain grandfathered [that would be me]. But the Bush Administration slammed that door shut again in 2003, and while it has reopened a bit under Obama, we are still spending enormous resources enforcing policies designed to exclude most vets from VA care.

The VA is what you get when the government works.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

As the article states massive new hospitals and clinics were built during the Bush reign in northern red states that are empty because all the vets moved south. Obama's trying to build more, unfortunately that hard to do with the level of obstruction in the House.

Let me get this straight, they built a bunch of hospitals based on politics rather than need, and this somehow proves that the government is great at running health care.

Did I sum up your position?

Ya know...I used to think you were like a smarter @Yurt . I'm now convinced you're a much dumber @007 .

Just so I'm not ****** again...you left one word out above. Try to figure it out.

Is it asshole? Scumbag? Idiot? Lying sack of shit?

 

[TemplarKormac]

Funny how Howey thinks he speaks for all the Vets who have encountered the VA... as we can already tell, most of them don't agree with Howey's assessment. He should try being a vet, or a family member of one before he starts touting the "success" of the VA system.

 

[FA_Q2]

Funny how Howey thinks he speaks for all the Vets who have encountered the VA... as we can already tell, most of them don't agree with Howey's assessment. He should try being a vet, or a family member of one before he starts touting the "success" of the VA system.

I always find it funny when people quote statistics citing that 'approval ratings' from any agency that services military and is better than the approval ratings for a civilian equivalent is somehow indicative of anything whatsoever.

Somehow I don't see the complaint system that deals with people who willingly went to war, risked their lives, lost limbs, were separated from their families for years and many times went without basics like showers and TP for months as something that can be compared to a civilian system.

 

[blackhawk]

Only if you can get it the VA may very we'll have great medical care but that doesn't help you if you can't get the appointment with them.

You might want to read the thread and links before you spew any more stupid.

You might want to keep with the news before you post anymore stupid responses.

 

[Howey]

Funny how Howey thinks he speaks for all the Vets who have encountered the VA... as we can already tell, most of them don't agree with Howey's assessment. He should try being a vet, or a family member of one before he starts touting the "success" of the VA system.

I am a vet and have been using the system for twenty years you stupid goat fucker.

 

[Howey]

Why, yes! In one word, yes.

Well, yes, as the author of the title Best Care Anywhere, Why VA Health Care would be Better for Everyone, it’s been dispiriting to have it confirmed by a preliminary inspector general’s report that some frontline VA employees in Phoenix and elsewhere have been gaming a key performance metric regarding wait times. But what’s really has me enervated is how the dominate media narrative of the VA “scandal” has become so essentially misleading and damaging to the cause of health care delivery system reform...

...can we get clear on just what the underlying reality is? There is, to be sure, a systemic backlog of vets of all ages trying to establish eligibility for VA health care. This is due to absurd laws passed by Congress, which reflect on all us, that make veterans essentially prove that they are “worthy” of VA treatment (about which more later). But this backlog often gets confused with the entirely separate issue of whether those who get into system face wait times that are longer than what Americans enrolled in non-VA health care plans generally must endure.

Just what do we know about how crowded VA hospitals are generally? Here’s a key relevant fact that is just the opposite of what most people think. For all the wars we’ve been fighting, the veterans population has been falling sharply (pdf). Nationwide, their number fell by 17 percent between 2000 and 2014, primarily due to the passing of the huge cohorts of World War II- and Korea War-era vets. The decline has been particularly steep in California and throughout much of New England, the Mid-Atlantic and industrial Midwest, where the fall off has ranged between 21 percent and 36.7 percent.

Reflecting this decline, as well a general trend toward more outpatient services, many VA hospitals in these areas, including flagship facilities, want for nothing except sufficient numbers of patients to maintain their long-term viability. I have visited VA hospitals around the county and often been unnerved by how empty they are. When I visited two of the VA’s four state-of-the-art, breathtakingly advanced polytrauma units, in Palo Alto and Minneapolis, there was hardly a patient to be found.

But at the same time there is a comparatively small countertrend that results from large migrations of aging veterans from the Rust Belt and California to lower-cost retirement centers in the Sun Belt. And this flow, combined with more liberal eligibility standards that allow more Vietnam vets to receive VA treatment for such chronic conditions as ischemic heart disease and Parkinson’s, means that in some of these areas, such as, Phoenix, VA capacity is indeed under significant strain.

This regional imbalance in capacity relatively to demand makes it very difficult to manage the VA with system-wide performance metrics. Setting a benchmark of 14 days to see a new primary care doc at a VA hospital or clinic in Boston or Northern California may be completely reasonable. But trying to do the same in Phoenix and in a handful of other sunbelt retirement meccas is not workable without Congress ponying up for building more capacity there.

Once you have this background, it becomes easy to understand certain anomalies in this scandal. If care is really so bad, for example, why did all the major veterans services remain unanimous in recent testimony before Congress in their long-stranding praise for the quality of VA health care? And why have they remained stalwart in defending the VA against its many ideological enemies who want to see it privatized? It’s because, by and large, VA care is as good, if not better than what vets can find outside the system, including by such metrics as wait times.

Similarly, if VA care were not generally very good, the VA would not continue to rank extraordinarily high in independent surveys of patient satisfaction. Recently discharged VA hospital patients for example, rate their experience 4 points higher than the average (pdf) for the health care industry as a whole. Fully 96 percent say they would turn to VA inpatient care again.

Now if you go out looking for vets who say they have been victimized by the VA, you will have no trouble finding them, and many will be justified in their complaints. But as I’ll argue further in future posts, the key question to ask when confronting the real deficiencies of the VA is “compared to what?” Once that context is established, it becomes clear that VA as a whole continues to outperform the rest of the American health system, making its true lessons extremely important to learn.

The solution seem clear to me, but what are your ideas? Obviously, we don't want to dismantle something that's beloved by it's patients and is working so well....

ill take UCI Med Center or St Josephs Med Center any day over the VA Hospital in Long Beach.....and im willing to bet most Vets would too.....

More problems discovered at UCI Medical Center - Los Angeles Times