The scandal at the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Hospital lifted the curtain of secrecy on the VA’s secret waiting lists. The VA lies while patients die.
This is by no means a new phenomenon. The nation’s single-payer system for veterans has long been greatly overloaded. Congress tried to fix it in 1996 by passing a law requiring that any veteran needing care had to be seen within 30 days.
The VA is supposed to have a wonderful electronic medical records system, and the EMR is supposed to be the magic formula for efficiency and quality. The VA gamed the electronic system to hide the waiting lists.
Readers of the British press will be struck by the similarities between fudging waiting lists at VA hospitals and stacking patients in ambulances outside U.K. hospitals. Finding it impossible to comply with a National Health Service mandate that all patients admitted to an emergency room be seen within four hours, hospitals kept patients waiting in ambulances outside the ER!
Britain’s NHS and our VA system are both administratively top-heavy, command-and-control bureaucracies. All such systems tend to expand, along with their budgets, as administrators hire more and more people to do what they were supposed to be doing. There is no competition, and virtually no accountability. Every problem is always someone else’s responsibility. Mandates and quotas, rather than incentives, are used to motivate those in the trenches.
Physicians working in the VA system, like the NHS, are mostly salaried employees. There are many fine doctors in both systems, but the incentives in place do not reward them for going the extra mile, seeing the additional patient or doing another procedure if it means going past their shift. Inevitably, these systems create backlogs and lengthening queues for care.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/05/obamacare-endgame-va-care-for-all/
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