Privatization Kills: Veterans Edition

The only solution repugs have for any problem with a government program is to kill it through privatization.

Phillip Longman at Political Animal:

On Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, announced that he had reached a compromise with John McCain and other Senate Republicans on how to fix whatever it is that needs fixing at the VA. The legislation contains some good ideas, like providing for the hiring of more doctors and nurses where they are needed. But the bill also contains one provision that is a significant concession to Republican enemies of government. If enacted, it would lower the quality of health care received by veterans while setting back the movement for health care delivery system reform generally.  

This is the provision in the draft legislation that would, according to a Senate Veterans Committee press release, “allow veterans living more than 40 miles from a VA hospital or clinic to access more convenient private care.” Given all the headlines about excessive wait times and backlogs at the VA, that might sound smart at first hearing, but in practice it could well lead to a disaster. 

SNIP 

And superior coordination of care is one main reason why the VA, despite it flaws, continues to outperform most other health care providers in most measures of health care quality. Because the VA truly is a system, it can coordinate among all the different specialists and other health care providers who are necessarily involved in patient care these days. And because it operates as a system, the VA can also make sure that all these medical professionals are working from a common electronic medical record and adhering to established, evidence-based protocols of care—not inadvertently ordering up dangerous combinations of drugs, or performing unnecessary surgeries and tests just to make a buck.


 

In short, as I explain further in my book Best Care Anywhere, the VA can treat the whole patient as opposed to one body part at a time. And due to its near lifelong relationship with its patients, which often extends to long-term nursing home care at the end of life, the VA also has incentives for investing in prevention and patient wellness that are largely absent elsewhere in U.S. medicine.
 

The VA pioneered this model of an integrated, evidence-based, health care delivery system platform that is aligned with the interests of its patients. The last thing we should want to see is more veterans getting treatment in the comparatively more chaotic, fragmented, dangerous, profit-maximizing world of U.S. medicine outside the VA. Instead, the challenge before us is to stop excluding so many vets from VA care with absurd eligibility standards, while giving the VA the capacity it needs to bring its superior model of care to a larger population. Eventually, we need a VA that is open to not only all vets and their family members, but more public health care systems like it that anyone can join.