Veterans Administration, or VA, hospitals outperformed their private, civilian counterparts according to survey made public earlier this month. The VA is the nation’s largest integrated healthcare system, caring for about 9 million veterans, many of them working class and persons of color, at 1,255 facilities. According to Military News,
More than two-thirds of 114 Department of Veterans Affairs [hospital] facilities received four- or five-star ratings, outperforming private hospitals by 26 percentage points.
Of 4,654 hospitals assessed by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a federal agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, 10% received five-star ratings and another 17% attained four-star ratings, but for VA hospitals those figures were nearly 37% and 30%, respectively.
NPR reported in June that a Medicare survey released that month
found that veterans rated Veterans Affairs hospitals higher than private health care facilities in all 10 categories of patient satisfaction … [including] patient satisfaction, hospital cleanliness and communication with nurses and doctors.
NPR adds,
Despite many widely publicized scandals, VA health care has been consistently rated as competitive with private care in dozens of peer-reviewed articles.
While the above-described ratings are new, the idea that the VA is the best-kept socialized-medicine secret in the Unites States is not. In his book Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care Would Work Better for Everyone, published in 2012, author Phillip Longman wrote:
The VA model of care continues to outperform the rest of the U.S. healthcare system based on key metrics, including patient safety, wait times, cost-effectiveness, avoidance of racial disparities, and adherence to evidence-based protocols of care.
The Rand Corporation, a Southern California think tank, likewise concluded in 2018,
The VA health care system performs similar to or better than non-VA systems on most measures of inpatient and outpatient care quality, although there is high variation in quality across individual VA facilities.
Naturally, when a U.S. government program works this well at helping ordinary citizens, politicians line up to destroy the program by way of privatization schemes, and that has been attempted in recent years with the VA. In the Obama era privatization of VA healthcare services was sold as a matter of “choice.” Proponents forced the choice in a tried-and-true manner: first starve the public agency of money and staffing, then complain that the agency is “failing,” and, in the case of the VA, offer veterans the “choice” to receive services from politically connected private health care providers who may have no idea how to treat veterans.
Predictably, such privatization schemes lead to corruption and poor service. As related in the 2022 book Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veteran’s Affairs, one private health provider brought in to solve the problem of increased wait times at purposely understaffed the VHA centers was found to have falsified wait-time data, allowing administrators to collect performance bonuses. Another contractor sent veterans to a Florida doctor who was under federal investigation. A 2021 Stanford study reviewed 400,000 ambulance calls made by veterans and found that when a veteran was taken to a non-VA emergency room, the veteran’s risk of death over the following 28 days doubled, and the cost the taxpayer increased 21 percent.
Given destructive privatization attempts in recent years, the recent surveys placing VA care above that provided by the private system is good news.
Perhaps instead of “medicare for all,” we should be insisting on “VA care for all.”