VA Woes Aren’t New—You Can’t Get Good Care From a Shitty System
J.D. Tuccille|May. 23, 2014 12:06 pm
As a third-year medical student in the 1990s, my wife did her surgical rotation at a Veterans Health Administration (VHA) facility. “The guys were great,” she says, referring to the patients. “But the place was a dump.”
She keeps remembering the flies that circled over a patient in an operating room during an open heart procedure.
A friend of mine, a Vietnam vet, experienced the VHA from the other side, as a patient. He couldn’t get in to see a specialist during one of his bouts of health trouble so a nurse got on Skype and described his heart beat to a physician a hundred miles away.
There is such a thing as telemedicine, which brings far-flung patients closer to medical care through the miracle of electronic connections. Saying “thump-a-thump-a-thump-a…” into an old Dell laptop ain’t it.
The VHA’s problems go far beyond secret waiting lists and canceled appointments. Yes, it’s bad that facilities delay the delivery of care to veterans into a future sometimes so distant that the would-be patients are more of a concern for morticians than for physicians by the time they make it to the front of the line. But the sad fact is that the care they finally receive often sucks.
In 2010, well before the current scandal, the Los Angeles Times reported, “Many veterans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan are being buffeted by a VA disability system clogged by delays, lost paperwork, redundant exams, denials of claims and inconsistent diagnoses.”
https://reason.com/blog/2014/05/23/va-woes-arent-newyou-cant-get-good-care