The New, Improved VA & Its Even Longer Wait Times

by JASmius



The Veterans Administration: You will never see a more wretched hive of "health care reform," at least until ObamaCare lands us all in Medicaid:

The number of veterans seeking health care but ending up on waiting lists of one month or more is 50% higher now than it was a year ago when a scandal over false records and long wait times wracked the Department of Veterans Affairs, the New York Times reported. The VA also faces a budget shortfall of nearly $3 billion....

Despite the massive funding increases they received a year ago.

....the Times reported in a story posted online ahead of its Sunday editions. The agency is considering furloughs, hiring freezes and other significant moves to reduce the gap, the newspaper reported.

At the same time as patient demand is rocketing through the roof, and despite....

In the last year, the VA has increased capacity by more than seven million patient visits per year, double what officials originally thought they needed to fix shortcomings, the Times reported. However, the newspaper added, department officials did not anticipate just how much physician workloads and demand from veterans would continue to soar. At some major veterans hospitals, demand was up by one-fifth, the paper reported. [All emphases added]

And remember, that gusher of VA appropriations was but the most recent of many:

Between 2000 and 2012, the VA’s budget nearly tripled, rising to $124 billion from $45 billion. Even after adjusting for medical inflation, which has grown much faster than normal consumer price inflation, the VA budget increased by 72% between 2000 and 2012. Over that same time, the total number of VA patients increased by 69%, from 3.3 million in 2000 to nearly 5.6 million in 2012. According to figures contained in the departmental appendices accompanying annual Office of Management and Budget proposals, the number of acute inpatients treated by the VA increased by only 49%. The VA has a whole bunch of problems, but a lack of funding ain’t one.

The VA's problem is, indeed, not a lack of resources, nor is it really even a lack of competence, or its overabundance of corruption (the slight decline in which is the reason why we're getting more accurate reporting of ever-escalating treatment wait times).  The core problem is that it is a nationalized, socialized, government-run system that has zero incentive to serve its "customers" to the best of its ability and capacity and every incentive to slack off and cheat and lie about it because those are the incentives that nationalized, socialized, government-run systems always create.  They, in fact, cannot do anything else.  When your agency's funding, and therefore your own salary, is guaranteed no matter how crappy a job it and you do, and the crappier you do your job the more funding you receive, what other results can anybody sanely expect?

The solution to the VA's problem is sublimely simple: Privatization.  Perhaps with "veterans' tax credits" or some such remedy to help pay for part or all of their care, since they did earn it in service to our country, but privatize it.  Because the free market is the only place where quality and the best service at the lowest possible price is ever, and ever has been, and ever will be attainable.

The vicious cycle of "Government takeover/failure/more funding/government failure/"reform"/even more failure" has to be broken somewhere.  Why not with the VA?

Yeah, it'll never happen, just like with any other genuine solution.  But we can either break the vicious cycle now, or it will inevitably break us.  I don't know about y'all, but I choose the former.