If you want a job where you can miss days, weeks, or even months and not get canned, I have just the job for you. It's called The Veterans Administration, which wastes more than ten billion dollars a year due to worker absenteeism. The second highest offender is, believe it or not-the Treasury Department.
It's not that they are not aware of the infractions. After all, at least they don't pay them. Nevertheless, it still costs the Departments money in lost productivity.
I have thought for some time the VA needs to get the axe. Why is it even necessary? Why not simply allow veterans to have their medical needs covered by the government but at the same time simply go to their neighborhood doctors, hospitals, and pharmacists, right in their own home towns, as opposed to traveling sometimes in excess of one hundred miles round trip and still having to wait half a day-at least-for substandard care. The VA is a bureaucratic nightmare, and though understaffed and underfunded, still wastes billions of dollars annually.
Is it the image of the VA that we are so enthralled with, the idea that we just should have something like that? It's a mess. I can see having a special facility like Walter Reed for special cases that require extensive recuperative therapy and the kind of surgeries and treatments you cant get at a regular hospital, but for the most part most of the veterans would be far better served by their own hometown doctors and, when necessary, their referred-to-specialists.
It would certainly be cost effective, and veterans would, for the most part, get something they don't now get as a general rule-quality care.
4 comments:
Veterans are generally happy with the care they get at VA Hospitals. Without UHI it would be suicide for a vet to go to a private hospital.
I don't know who you know Ren, but I've never heard any veteran with anything good to say about VA. It's a bureaucratic nightmare, understaffed and underfunded, yet still a waste of billions of dollars. It stays alive on the strength of federal employees union, in my opinion.
I had an uncle who died depending on the VA. He was out of his mind from advanced Alzheimer's and suffering from prostrate cancer, but they still wouldn't let him stay overnight. If you had asked him if he was satisfied with it, he probably would have said yes too. What other choice did he have?
If you don't live in the immediate vicinity, you might drive for hours round trip, maybe even one way, and when you get there you have to wait for hours for what should be a simple routine visit. Then, when they finally see you in some cases, they don't really do anything for you a lot of the time.
Another relative waited for hours at a time once, only to find out that his form had been thrown in the trash by a receptionist who wanted to thin out the line. He looked through the trash and found it himself.
This kind of stuff is commonplace at VA hospitals. It seems to be the rule, not the exception.
I don't think I'd throw out the whole VA. They do more than just health care. They oversee student and home loans for vets, too. AFAIK they don't actually make the loans, tho, they just guarantee them, so you make a good point regarding the hospitals. It does seem wasteful to run whole hospitals as opposed to just providing a kind of insurance policy.
Most of the folks I have known to use VA hospitals did so as a last resort.
Quim-
I misspoke when I called for the abolition of the VA. My focus is mainly on the VA hospitals. They need to go. The buildings themselves can be remodeled and put to use in some other manner, but the odious hospital system needs to be abolished.
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