My brother was a Dr in the military and is now a Dr with the VA - he says the differences were staggering. In the military, if he needed something done, he asked his superior officer and got a "yes"" and proceeded. In the VA, the same request has to go through several levels of superiors and takes weeks to months, and the patients suffer dearly. Sometimes his superiors tell him to "just prescribe a pill and get them out of here" when really they don't need a pill, they need real help (he's a psychologist). The people above the DR's are all about getting the patients out the door and not really helping them. They are always backed up because they do not have enough staff for all the patients they see. He absolutely hates it because as a Doctor, he should have some discretionary ability to make decisions, but his hands are tied by the bureaucracy. He needs to hire more Dr's to help him - he got the okay, made a decision on who he wanted to hire, told the DR she was going to be hired, and then waited for 6 months for the higher ups to approve her start date (they had approved hiring her, just not given a start date). By the time she was approved to start, she had already decided to take another job. This happens over and over every time he tries to hire someone. He went through the same process when he was hired -they told him they were going to hire him - he moved 3 states away for the job, and then just sat in his apartment for 4 months (with no pay) until they finally allowed him to start. Luckily the Army owed him 3 months of pay & vacation from his service in Afghanistan, so he was able to afford to wait. The VA is a certifiable bloated mess.
I was just at the VA a few days ago and my doctor had quite a bit to say about the whole mess. It's not a funding issue as much as it is a bureaucratic nightmare. To do something as simple as change a prescription in they system takes a doctor several minutes because of all of the different forms they have to fill out in order to do it. My doctor said that he could see twice as many patients if not for the unnecessarily time consuming system. Obviously there are other factors, but that's one of the major problems.
The Department of Veterans Affairs Act of 1988 (Pub.L. 100-527) changed the former Veterans Administration, an independent government agency established in 1930, primarily to see to the needs of World War I veterans, into a Cabinet-level Department of Veterans Affairs. It was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan on October 25, 1988, but actually came into effect under the term of his successor, George H. W. Bush, on March 15, 1989. The Department of Veterans Affairs was created due to nearly one third of the population being eligible for veterans benefits. Its proponents argued that due to the large number of Americans affected by the VA, it needed an administrator who had direct access to the president.[8] In their major reform period of 1995–2000, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) implemented universal primary care, closed 55% of their acute care hospital beds, increased patients treated by 24%, had a 48% increase in ambulatory care visits, and decreased staffing by 12%. By 2000, the VHA had 10,000 fewer employees than in 1995 and a 104% increase in patients treated since 1995, and had managed to maintain the same cost per patient-day, while all other facilities' costs had risen over 30% to 40% during the same period. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Veterans_Affairs
I can't tell if the passage you posted highlights a staffing and funding problem or credits an efficient medical process. I'm guessing it's a little of both, weighted to the staffing problem side. I looked for more info, but this is all I found (from the same link):
No, thats what completely deprivatized government healthcare would look like if it were to happen in the U.S. Thats NOT Obamacare at all. Obamacare is NOT government-run healthcare. Its a set of rules, regulations, and standards set by the government for the private healthcare system. Last I recall - Obamacare does not own all the hospitals and employee all the doctors.
The problem is too few Doctors and Nurses and far too many people Above them making (or rather not making) decisions. If they fired all the bureaucrats and hired more Doctors and nurses, they would be able to treat more patients faster and better.
I was just pointing to the fact that the VA's problems are long term, systemic and result from the politicization of a process that should be designed and run by technically proficient and experienced professionals. Also, that, all the issues were known prior to the Iraq wars (hell, Viet Nam) but yet we as nation continued to make promises to promote enlistment that we knew we could not keep. We would basically have needed dedicated Medical Schools and a dedicated Health Administration schools that train doctors and administrators for free with a contract to serve. That we can spend billions on weapons systems, some completely superfluous, while ignoring the real costs of warfare. There is little we can do on a short term scale to help, no matter how much anyone screams Fartbongo, but we should at least learn the lesson for the future.
Ah. We should probably take the Brown University report seriously then (from above): I haven't read about McCain's new bill yet, but I hope it recognizes structural (long term) changes.
If it gathers votes from the Grand Old Tea Party it is probably just another cases of magical thinking akin to: create more wounded vets; pretend replacing Shinseki or blame Obama and it will all be ok. Just eliminate waste and it will all be ok.
My good friend Ben Ghazi served in both Iraq and Afghanistan and has had to wait over two months so far for his first visit with a VA doctor.
They get a lot of mileage out of that government run healthcare lie. It's a shame people don't find the facts and think for themselves.
I don't know much about this topic, but the question that pop out at me is ..... why do we even have a separate health care system in the VA just for veterans cares? Why not leverage and use the medicare system? [I'm thinking, so inefficient]
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Are you really that obtuse? Of course we understand what it is now. What people like you dont understand is the new system is unsustainable. Changes will need to be made, and it wont be for the better. The VA started out as a great institution, just as the ACA is suppose to.
Phoenix VA awarded themselves $10M in bonuses between 2011-2013 while they continued to make vets suffer and wait ages for an appointment. I'd say that's a pretty good indication of the bankrupt values within the leadership of the VA. I wonder who else could have been helped or saved with that $10M had it not been wasted on people undeserving. http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/arizona/investigations/2014/06/17/phoenix-va-gave-mil-bonuses-last-years/10653263/
More money wisely spent by the VA on green initiatives rather than healing the wounded. http://p.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/19/editorial-strange-priorities-at-the-va/
