My brother is a fully disabled veteran. He uses VA hospitals and over the years has had excellent service, better, he says, than he got in the private sector. He understands that VA hospitals have some serious problems. But he also knows that the answer is fixing the system, not scrapping it.
When Rep. Richard Hudson says in his recent ad that he wants to “free veterans from a failed VA,” he really means, “You’re on your own.” Too many members of Congress would push veterans out into the world of private medicine and shutter the VA. Most veterans wouldn’t get better service. They would just lack the leverage to get attention to problems they are facing today.
Many of the problems at the VA stem from a system unprepared for the number of veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. We need to first and foremost fully fund veterans’ programs, not privatize them. If the VA was unprepared for the influx of veterans, the private sector will be, too. Private sector health care is no piece of cake. Ask anyone caught up in the web of our health care system.
Veterans want to have a functioning VA. They are generally satisfied with the care they get and they believe that benefits are part of the bargain they made when they signed up. They’re right. We owe them a system that works and we should fix what we have.
We need to reform the system by, first, fully funding it. We can offer better care by working with private sector providers, instead of competing with them, to help veterans get the care they deserve. We can cut red tape to make the decision-making process more flexible and add accountability to make the VA more responsive. However, we should not shut it down.
People like my brother are proof that the VA works. It needs more resources and thoughtful, serious reform. It doesn’t need competition from the private sector and it doesn’t need to be abandoned. But when politicians like Richard Hudson talk about a “failed VA,” they don’t want to fix it. They want to scrap it.
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As a USAF vet, Rep. Hudson’s current TV commercials have me almost yelling at the screen. They are appealing to those who have no respect for the office of the President of the United States, by Rep. Hudson’s constant referring to the President as “Obama,” not as “President Obama.” With all his talk about religion, I think Rep. Hudson is running for N.C. Ayatollah; he’s yet another of what I call “America’s Taliban,” trying to jam his religion down all of our throats by passing unconstitutional laws respecting its establishment.
Spot on Thomas. The VA has saved my father’s life more than once, but at the same time he has had sub-par care, too. I go to 99% of his VA appointments, and have been to more than half dozen private facilities with him. I met with the Chief of Medicine at the Durham VA during dad’s 74 day hospital stay in 2010 and he put it in perspective for me. “If you want the best primary care system in the world, go to the VA. If you are a complicated case like your father, go to the best private hospital you can afford.” Pretty much sums it up. The VA has learned how to stretch a thin dime to make sure Veterans get the best basics. The level of care you receive after that depends on the level of family support of each individual veteran. That is sad.
Since its reorganization several decades ago, the VA healthcare system is clearly better and more cost-effective than our “private” system with its profit-focussed insurance companies and their greedy CEOs. Problems in the Va are due to underfunding and political interference!
In order to fix the VA, you first need to remove it from the auspices of DoD. The Veterans Administration should be a stand alone just like other departments. If Congress just can’t stomach creating another ‘bureaucracy’, fine. Move it to the Department of Health. Anywhere so that when budget time comes, there’s not a competition for funds for the latest weapon or fixing the outcomes of the last great weapon. They were broken in our name, in support of our policies, and in perpetuation of our ‘freedoms’. Make of that what you will. But we owe it to them to take care of them, for their lifetime if necessary and not shortcut or shortsheet them that care or care that they need.
Maybe Richard Hudson should put himself in harm’s way and when he gets back from his tour, go find out what the VA is all about from the inside. That bird might be singing a different tune.
After Vietnam, the VA earned a terrible reputation for denying service to veterans who were suffering from service-related illness and injury. Agent orange, the powerful herbicide used to eliminate all the foliage in jungles, caused horrific health problems. Veterans seeking treatment for those illnesses were denied based on lies: even though the chemicals would kill every tree, bush or vine in the jungle, no humans would be injured by it. Most of the flight crews who dumped Agent Orange all died long ago. Agent Orange is still causing cancers and other serious medical problems today. PTSD was not a thing either. Veterans were denied treatment then because the VA and the Defense Department would not acknowledge that combat stress would cause long-term health issues. It was a big lie.
The VA system was second-rate, at best, and it was overwhelmed by the millions of returning veterans. Things have changed at the VA in recent decades.
Still underfunded and needing more manpower, the VA system has many bright spots. Before managed care, private practice was an attractive alternative to working in large groups. Doctors could make a good living on their own. That is no longer the case, astronomically expensive modern equipment makes it virtually impossible to open a sole practice any longer. The Kaiser model is probably the finest care delivery system in America, and doctors do not want to be on call 24/7. The VA could be as good. It can offer a doctor decent pay and benefits and a 40-hour work week. The VA also has a nationwide central records system and a website whereby the veteran can access medical information, treatment, and prescriptions. Clinics and hospitals are located all over the country.
The VA is superior to medical plans like Humana. Humana is a fragmented system of contracts with unrelated facilities and providers, not a medical system. There is no central database at Humana and your doctors will probably not know or communicate with each other. The VA, unlike Medicare, is exempt from the idiotic rule enacted by Republican that forbids competitive bidding on prescription drugs. Drugs are cheaper through the VA.
Rep. Hudson knows nothing about the military. He is transparently pimping the VA for votes without a clue about the needs of veterans. His ads showing decapitations are intended to amp up fear that terrorists are standing at unprotected borders with daggers are dumb and insulting. Hudson is a liar and completely unqualified to hold office.
The VA can be fixed, but not by Hudson or his GOP colleagues. He knows too little about health care systems and little about what works in the real world. He would make things much worse. The VA needs to upgrade their facilities and to hire more doctors. That would take money. Like the Affordable Care Act, like Medicare and Social Security, Hudson and his GOP “conservatives” want to destroy it and replace it with nothing.
Richard Hudson should be selling used cars.
He says wants to “free veterans from a failed VA,” but he votes against those appropriations. The VA already has a program which will allow the veteran to seek private care if the system cannot accommodate a veteran in a timely way. If Hudson won’t pay for the existing system, he will never vote for a much, much more expensive system of private care.
The country should operate on this maxim: “Don’t send our children to war if you can’t afford to fix them when they come back broken.” Richard Hudson would break a lot of them based on his completely cartoonish and uninformed notions of what our armed services do.
As someone who came of age during the Vietnam War, I have many friends who are veterans and who receive at least part of their health care from the VA. Considering that a majority of them were drafted into the military, it seems not only ironic, but morally wrong to attempt to take their VA health care away. This is only exacerbated by the fact that many (I would wager most) of the politicians who want to dismantle the VA did not serve in the military–and those who have been elected enjoy the privilege of government health care via their positions as “representatives” of those whose health care they wish to eliminate. I note that these politicians aren’t volunteering to give up their own government health-care benefits: to reverse a 1960s slogan, they appear to have as their motto, “Take it from the needy, give it to the greedy”. But then, that appears to be the main plank in Republicans’ theory of government.