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HEALTH CARElives within shouting distance of some of America’s
most revered private hospitals. For her own care,
however, she chooses the local VA, including the tests
and treatments she needed after she was diagnosed
with breast cancer. “Everything is accessible here,
and the women’s imaging center is almost like a spa,”
she says. “They’re just so good at so many things.”
A common criticism of government-run health
care is that wait times can be oppressive. In Austra-
lia, for example, wait times are twice as high in pub-
lic hospitals as in private facilities. In 2016 the GAO
found that wait times for a third of the VA’s prima-
ry-care visits were longer than a month, and last
year the agency said some vets who were referred
to health care providers outside the VA had to wait
as long 70 days for treatment. By most accounts,
wait times have improved since then. Studies have
shown that the VA’s wait times for care turn out
to be shorter on average than those in the private
sector for all types of treatments, with the one ex-
ception of elective orthopedic procedures such as
knee surgery, where delays usually pose little risk
to the patient. According to that 2019 VFW survey,
84 percent of vets said they were able to get care “in
a timely manner.”
“Government health care” conjures images of a
cumbersome bureaucracy. Compared to the Byz-
antine rules and requirements of the private health
care insurance industry, however, the VA has less
bureaucratic overhead, says Neil Evans, a physician
who runs the VA’s Office of Connected Care. VA doc-
tors don’t have to get pre-authorization from insur-
ance companies or anyone else. “I struggle to think
of a single time when I felt an intervention was in
the best interests of a patient and I couldn’t get that
done— even if it was expensive,” he says. The need for
patients in the private health care system to get in-
surance-company approval can wreak havoc on care.
The result, as too many in the U.S. know all too
well, is private-sector care that tends to be fragment-
ed and frequently inadequate. And it’s almost always
costly, which often translates to no care at all. Studies
show that a third of Americans report they avoided
getting care within the past year because of costs,
more than any other industrialized nation.An Edge in Innovation
the va has managed to be at the forefront of
virtually every medical trend that experts say iscare were satisfied with how the health care system
worked, compared to 75 percent of those insured by
Medicare, and 69 percent of those insured through
their employers. Dartmouth’s 2018 study concluded
that VA hospitals on average performed better than
other hospitals in their regions in key measures of
care quality. VA hospital patients had lower rates of
readmissions within 30 days and suffered fewer com-
plications from infections, falls and blood clots when
they were in the hospital, the study found.
Perhaps most important, vets themselves tend to
speak highly of the system. A 2019 Veterans of For-
eign Wars survey of thousands of vets found that 91
percent of respondents recommend VA care to other
vets, and most chose the VA for their own health care
even though 98 percent of them had other options.
One of them is Christine Griffin, a Boston-area army
veteran and a lawyer who is partially paralyzed, has
top-notch private health care insurance. She alsoSAT ISFIED PARTIES
Veterans are mainly
happy with their care.
Top: Representative
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
has defended the VA. Left:
Veteran Eugene Simpson
at the hospital in Dale
City, Virginia. Below:
Congresswoman Katie
Porter visits Navy veteran
Kelly Alcala at the hospital
in Long Beach, California.