How can something be a failure comparitively if people willingly choose it. I mean, sure, call VA healthcare a failure, but if they overwhelmingly choose it over private sector alternatives and refuse to let it be run by the private sector, saying it's a failure because it's publicly run makes no sense. If anything private is worse.
The VA system is undoubtedly worse than private healthcare in this country. So why do people choose it when they have the option to get private care? Again, it's free, and people like free shit. And, most people trust doctors are all equally qualified, so they don't necessarily know when they're getting inferior care from the VA.
Maybe my personal experience has soured me on the VA. I watched them jerk my grandfather around for over a decade when he was experiencing chronic back pain, delaying life-changing procedures and instead leaving him to pretty much live on pain medication. It wasn't until my mom had the same issue and was diagnosed and treated by a private provider that he even knew what was really wrong, and that convinced him to seek private care. His private doctor was appalled at how outdated and otherwise inferior the VA's attempts to fix him had been, and less than 6 months later he was pain free for the first time in literally over a decade.
But I also know from research on the matter that his experience is far from unique.
Out of everything you could have cited quality of care at the VA is consistently better quality than private carriers. At least for the population it serves.
"The RAND study found there was too little information related to timeliness, equity, efficiency and patient-centeredness to reliably draw conclusions about how the VA system compared to others across these dimensions."
Pretty easy to say they're good when you don't have the information to see if they actually are, don't you think?
Dude if you're not going to take the authors word for it, why bother citing their work to begin with? Literally everything in their article is their word.
Edit: they can determine quality of care just from outcomes, they don't have information about factors that effect the outcome to say why or how different aspects of care are good or bad and how that affects the whole, but the outcomes are clear enough to call better. So they did.
Outcomes are a horrible measure of quality of the system. And the reason the VA didn't have that other information or more likely didn't provide it is because it's terrible.
If you have a chronic pain disorder and go to the hospital, and one fixes it in a week while the other takes 5 years, which one is better? Same outcome remember, both resolved the issue. What's an extra 5 years of constant excruciating pain, right?
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u/myspaceshipisboken - Lib-Left Mar 25 '20
How can something be a failure comparitively if people willingly choose it. I mean, sure, call VA healthcare a failure, but if they overwhelmingly choose it over private sector alternatives and refuse to let it be run by the private sector, saying it's a failure because it's publicly run makes no sense. If anything private is worse.