“I guarantee it wasn’t designed for the latter.”
Let me say that I’ve been treated good by the VA. It is hard to get an appointment and it’s inconvenient to go there though. The level of coverage you get is based on your net worth, and as a senior on medicare, medicare pays first anyway. I also have retirement insurance as well. Their coverage is crap, but that’s not part of this discussion. I happen to have a high net worth, (90+ percentile) So the VA doesn’t pay much for me...
You can also get the best of care in a hospital if you have the right coverage. Why not just issue a card to vets, and just let them use regular hospitals instead of having to wait so long?
The opposite is true... I got a letter from the VA the other day that stated that unless it was life threatening, they would not pay if you went to a Non-VA hospital. This makes no sense if there are waiting lists at the VA. That equates to substandard coverage.
“Why not just issue a card to vets, and just let them use regular hospitals instead of having to wait so long?”
I absolutely agree, and have since the first time I set foot in a VA.
I wrote on a related thread the other day that I rotated through several VA hospitals during training, and back then some of the VA hospitals I was at provided absolutely substandard care (in some instances, it was criminal). It was a combination of the attitudes of ‘guaranteed a job for life’ government employees (receptionists, technicians, nurses, you name it), the ridiculous bureaucratic hurdles involved in ordering tests etc., and that some VA hospitals had their own residency physicians who were almost all foreign medical grads - some of whom were less than committed to the long hours required as a resident back then (many were committed, and good, so I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush).
I have since seen VA hospitals that are run generally very well, with very committed staff, and so find it almost ironic that when VA hospitals were at their worst they were getting a pass, and now that they’ve improved, they’re finally getting the scrutiny they should have gotten long ago.
That said, it is my firm belief that government-run medicine is always going to be less than the US private system, by far. Unfortunately, the private system is now headed in the same direction, thanks to the same government involvement.