surprised there's not already a thread on this. Obama, of course, is outraged, now that he's learned about it from his teevee. and many O'care supporters have long highlighted the VA as an exemplar for the national health care. how does Shinseki still have a job?
Socialized, centralized medicine for you. Liberals are desperately trying to paint this as just a "scheduling" problem.
No one uses the VA medical system expecting really good healthcare. If you are really lucky, you'll get competent health care and that's even true locally despite the fact that Houston has one of the better VA hospitals in the country. Even then, it takes months to get just about anything done unless you show up in the emergency room. Nothing worth a damn is free and no one should expect otherwise.
http://www.va.gov/opa/pressrel/pressrelease.cfm?id=2537 WASHINGTON -- The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), an independent customer service survey, ranks the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) customer satisfaction among Veteran patients among the best in the nation and equal to or better than ratings for private sector hospitals. The 2013 ACSI report assessed satisfaction among Veterans who have recently been patients of VA’s Veterans Health Administration (VHA) inpatient and outpatient services. ACSI is the nation’s only cross-industry measure of customer satisfaction, providing benchmarking between the public and private sectors. In 2013, the overall ACSI satisfaction index for VA was 84 for inpatient care and 82 for outpatient care, which compares favorably with the U.S. hospital industry (scores of 80 and 83, respectively). Since 2004, the ACSI survey has consistently shown that Veterans give VA hospitals and clinics a higher customer satisfaction score, on average, than patients give private sector hospitals. These overall scores are based on specific feedback on customer expectations, perceived value and quality, responsiveness to customer complaints, and customer loyalty. One signature finding for 2013 is the continuing high degree of loyalty to VA among Veterans, with a score of 93 percent favorable. This score has remained high (above 90 percent) for the past ten years.
There are good things and bad things. It depends what you need from them really. If all you need is prescription drugs then it's amazing.
LOL, it's cool. I can imagine why they'd have a high approval rating though, it's free. There's nothing like getting a 40k procedure done without having to pay for it. The waiting and the red tape you have to go through to get things done is the biggest complaint and that's a result of high volume and bureaucratic nonsense than anything. Private care gets things done MUCH faster, but then you get beat over the head with the bill afterwards. It's give and take.
I would not call this a scandal. I would call this the predictable result of government-planned healthcare. It's proof positive that single-payer or centralized healthcare does not work. It's also a grim forewarning of what we're all in store for with Obamacare.
How do you account for the customer satisfaction rate being higher than the customer satisfaction rate of private hospitals?
That's odd, given that Obamacare is completely private-sector-based. Sounds like you have very little faith in the private sector to adapt to new insurance plans.
The post above is not true. Consider the dramatic Medicaid expansion and the fact that the IRS administers Obamacare as two really fast examples that completely invalidate your post. Obviously there are many more examples.
That's an interesting way to describe our system. http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=26781 A system where nearly half of healthcare expenditures are made by the government? And much of the other half is made by insurance companies that are private in name only? Recall that nearly 40% of the cost of “private” health insurance is covered by government subsidies. And that government regulators determine what procedures must be covered. And the government controls entry into the healthcare industry. This is called a “uniquely private system”?
I remember my granddad complaining about the VA in the 70's and my dad in the 00's. It's a shame as a nation we have never really taken care of our vets.
Medicaid is a payment system - the health care services are administered by the private sector. The IRS? It handles tax consequences and has no impact on the healthcare side of anything. It doesn't "administer" any health care. Neither is remotely similar to the VA or has any relationship to the problems there. You also are focused on payments, rather than service. The VA's problem is on the service side - it has nothing to do with whether the payments are private or public. If you're trying to show the VA is a bad system, then it suggests that the government is not good at running hospitals, which has nothing to do with Obamacare or the rest of our health care system.
But to the reason of this thread; not really good form to try and pin this on the current president. Bush got his war and consequences be damned. He maimed thousands of kids and now it's Obama's fault they aren't getting the care they need? But you are right. It's horrible and should be fixed.
Yep. Not to say the Obama administration is all roses, but here are a few things that happened to this effort: Clinton reformed the process and drove processing times down. W came onboard and even before the wars, the time it took to process a claim jumped from 166 to 224 days. Under the Obama administration, the VA patient load has increased by 1 million, in part due to the wars and in part because Obama kept a campaign promise as he did away with means testing and opened up the system to more vets. Meanwhile, the VA has to go through years of budget uncertainty (like the rest of the government), deal with sequester, continuing resolutions, and a government shutdown. Those kind of things have a delayed effect on efficiency, especially where hardware is not replaced on schedule. Even with that, the VA has cut processing times by over 50% from where they were in 2013, in part due to a new electronic records-keeping system. Repubs have continued to underfund or just not fund the VA. In Feb, they turned down a bipartisan bill that would have funded 24 new VA health centers. As we continue to underfund, the problems will get worse as vets from Iraq and Afghanistan age with their attendant health issues. In short, we have the VA system we want and the VA system we deserve, but it is awesomely rich for Repubs to try and make a huge deal out of this when they diminished what Clinton had done, started wars that added to the burden, created an atmosphere of uncertain budgets, and blocked needed funding. You would think a responsible politician would look at the issues and work with the other party to fix the problems, but it seems those days are gone.
