VA Vamping

Except for a few diehard statists, few suggest anymore that the nationalized healthcare offered in Canada and Western Europe are superior alternatives to our own. Not only are their wait-lines longer and care inferior, but they’ve had to greatly increase premium taxes and co-pays to even keep that afloat.

This healthcare analyst, for example, dissects the false numbers put forth by Ezra Klein’s defense of Canada, and again here. I posted about the British Medical Association admitting rationing of care in England. An authoritative Swedish report has Western Europeans access to the latest cancer drugs lagging far behind the U.S. In Germany, where national percent of GNP spent on medical care is approaching that in the U.S., German co-pays now are 10% or more, on top of the high taxes for medical care, and “Of 2000 hospitals, only 33 are medical centers with capability of handling more complex cases,” according to the Director of a major German academic medical center.

So, they point at the Veterans Administration as a domestic example of superior medical care, at less cost. Sorry, again.

No doubt, VA care is far, far improved from my post-Vietnam days. (It would be hard to get worse.) Washington Monthly extolled it as presently “The Best Care Anywhere,” and Newsweek later featured a similar story.

This theme was picked up by those favoring a nationalized healthcare system in the U.S. as demonstrating it is achievable. However, pointing out just a few of the flaws in the argument, I wrote in the Examiner:

The Newsweek article on the revamped Veterans Affairs hospital system, “The Best Medical Care in the U.S.,” is cited as what can be done by government, but as the article makes clear, it required “the military way of medicine,” a top doctor to take a sharp cut in income, and its pathbreaking executive to be fired by Congress for closing hospitals in “key districts … since the VA is as affected by politics as any other federal entity, that will always be a concern.”

The innovations and dedication that reformed VA hospitals is being pursued in other hospital systems, but, as Newsweek points out, a cause of much added paperwork and unnecessary defensive medicine elsewhere, is not the VA’s restriction, as “doctors don’t have to worry as much about malpractice lawsuits, since government agencies are somewhat protected.”

Heck: The U.S. consumer even rebelled at the milder controls by HMO’s in the 1990’s.

Now, the McClatchy Newspapers have further investigated superiority claims from the VA.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has habitually exaggerated the record of its medical system, inflating its achievements in ways that make it appear more successful than it is, a McClatchy Newspapers study shows….
* The agency has touted how quickly veterans get in for appointments, but its own inspector general found that scheduling records have been manipulated repeatedly.
* The VA boasted that its customer service ratings are 10 points higher than those of private-sector hospitals, but the survey it cited shows a far smaller gap.
* Officials repeatedly have said that a pivotal health-quality study ranked the agency's health care "higher than any other health-care system in this country." However, the study they cited wasn't designed to do that.

Read the entire for details.

I pointed out the hard data that the VA drug benefit was far more restrictive than Medicare Part D formularies. Apparently, VA enrollees figured this out for themselves, in Part D’s first year about a third switching out of VA to Part D.

My local VA hospital in La Jolla has up to an 18-month back-up for orthopedic surgeries for veterans of wars prior to Iraq/Afghanistan.

Most of the patients waiting for elective joint replacement are older veterans from earlier wars, he said. But the surge in new patients from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is taxing the whole system and pushing elective surgeries further back in the line, he [a VA orthopedic surgeon] said….

UC Berkeley professor of health policy John Ellwood said Tuesday that the issues faced by the VA hospital in La Jolla are a question of national priorities.

"I think we have been unwilling as a society to increase the resources of the Veterans (Affairs Department)," he said. "That is a value choice on the part of society."

In short, if veterans don’t merit taxpayer funds, what makes anyone think that other citizens (not to mention legal and illegal non-citizens) would fare better under a nationalized healthcare system?

Strikeout again, advocates of nationalized healthcare.