Posted on 05/22/2014 12:13:18 PM PDT by lowbridge
Naturally, then, politicians — Republicans in particular — are determined to scrap what works and promote what doesn’t. And that brings me to Mitt Romney’s latest really bad idea, unveiled on Veterans Day: to partially privatize the Veterans Health Administration (V.H.A.).
What Mr. Romney and everyone else should know is that the V.H.A. is a huge policy success story, which offers important lessons for future health reform.
Many people still have an image of veterans’ health care based on the terrible state of the system two decades ago. Under the Clinton administration, however, the V.H.A. was overhauled, and achieved a remarkable combination of rising quality and successful cost control. Multiple surveys have found the V.H.A. providing better care than most Americans receive, even as the agency has held cost increases well below those facing Medicare and private insurers. Furthermore, the V.H.A. has led the way in cost-saving innovation, especially the use of electronic medical records.
What’s behind this success? Crucially, the V.H.A. is an integrated system, which provides health care as well as paying for it. So it’s free from the perverse incentives created when doctors and hospitals profit from expensive tests and procedures, whether or not those procedures actually make medical sense. And because V.H.A. patients are in it for the long term, the agency has a stronger incentive to invest in prevention than private insurers, many of whose customers move on after a few years.
And yes, this is “socialized medicine” — although some private systems, like Kaiser Permanente, share many of the V.H.A.’s virtues. But it works — and suggests what it will take to solve the troubles of U.S. health care more broadly.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The Times is kidding, right?
Oh forgot, we’re not talkin’ folks playing a full deck.
After all, when you’re a journalist - you can only make things up for the paper, or switch to politics and make things up for fellow idiots.
It’s funny how Democrats are always “Pro-Choice” except when it comes non-abortion issues. Why not give our proud Veterans a choice, VA or a Voucher and let them choose. Seems fair to me??
If the V.A. improved it was because some dedicated veterans busted their humps to make it better. I have a friend who is a Viet Nam vet who has dedicated his life to this. It sure did not get better because of anything Clintoon did.
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