| Matthew Yglesias can't stand to watch Sen. Tom Coburn unfairly bash the Veteran Health Administration and responds with a deluge of studies favorable comparing the VHA with Medicare, private managed care, Johns Hopkins, and the Mayo Clinic.
At a meeting Forward Montana convened some time ago, one participant asked why we don't just open up the VHA to anyone who wants in. The problem strikes me as mostly one of scalability. The VHA is a relatively small system compared to, well, the entire country. Expanding it to cover everybody or even a much larger number of people would threaten the quality of care it currently provides.
But the thing is, the VHA works. With its government-employed doctors and nurses, its government-run clinics and hospitals, its government-decided rationing and cost controls, it gets good health outcomes. This hasn't always been true, but the VHA is currently the best healthcare system in the country, which is to say we could probably learn a ton from it.
But don't hold your breath waiting for our Congressman to do that. He's still too busy stoking fears about socialized medicine to see anything there worth studying.
Meanwhile, I should note -- socialized insurance, like what we have with Medicare, also does pretty well, although currently not quite as well as the VHA. And Medicare, which seems to have less internal reform authority than the VHA (can someone confirm or deny that for me) needs to make some much-needed changes in its reimbursement structures (as do most private insurance and managed care operations in the U.S.). |
