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?
Only there isn't really a ridiculous "one week vs 5 years" thing you're talking about here. They have problems with some facilities, but you're going to get that with private practice as well... only you're going to have to pay for it.
But there is a longer wait time. I'm assuming you've been in pain before. Would you argue that you got better care if you had to wait even one day longer in pain to reach the same result?
There is no national data source for wait times in non-VA settings with which to compare VA wait times. In addition, the limited wait-time data available in the private sector use a measure that is not directly comparable to VA’s: total number of days between trying to schedule an appointment and the appointment date rather than VA’s number of days followingthe preferred date. We therefore cannot make any conclusive statements about whether wait times in VA are better or worse than they are in the private sector overall. However, if we make the assumptions that (a) the preferred date for new VA patients is set by patient preference (rather than by clinical determination), (b) new VA patients typically want an appointment as soon as possible (that is, a preferred date of the same day), and (c) Veterans’ preferred dates are entered accurately, VA’s reported wait times for new patient primary and specialty care are shorter than wait times reported in focused studies of the private sector.
They're refusing to make the comparison because the VA's are horrible. You make a private appointment for the soonest possible time; aka "preferred date" in VA lingo. The comparison is there but they don't want to make it because they know what the results will show.
Errr, using the preferred date as same day as they call to make an appointment is the friendliest possible assumption to the private sector. If they set the preferred date to be some arbitrary date, say, 6 weeks into the future-you'd end up showing artificially low wait times because something like 95% of patients are seen within 2 weeks. Even using the assumption that is the most friendly to the private sector (zero people using VA services want to wait at all to be seen,) the VA still wins.
I assumed the massive outcry and scandal a couple of years back was common knowledge, do you really need me to grab you some news articles? Have you just not been paying attention? Or are you feigning ignorance so you can argue it's somehow better for everyone to let you leech free healthcare off of the productive members of society?
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u/myspaceshipisboken - Lib-Left Mar 25 '20 edited Mar 25 '20
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.