Is VA Care Better Than Hospitals?

[Howey]

Where's all the outrage over this? Why aren't Republicans and teabaggers demanding that every hospital administrator and doctor in the country be fired?

40 deaths for the VA? That's chicken feed!

In 1999, Americans learned that 98,000 people were dying every year from preventable errors in hospitals. That came from a widely touted analysis by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) called To Err Is Human. This was the “Silent Spring” of the health care world, grabbing headlines for revealing a serious and deadly problem that required policy and action.

As it turns out, those were the good old days.

According to a new study just out from the prestigious Journal of Patient Safety, four times as many people die from preventable medical errors than we thought, as many as 440,000 a year.

Back in the old days, the IOM experts had very little concrete information to use in estimating the extent of killer errors in hospitals. But with innovations in research techniques led by Dr. David Classen, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and others, we now have more tools to tell us where the bodies are buried.

With these latest revelations, medical errors now claim the spot as the third leading cause of death in the United States, dwarfing auto accidents, diabetes and everything else besides Cancer and heart disease. Harvard’s Dr. Lucian Leape, the father of the patient safety movement and one of the experts behind the original IOM report, says the numbers in this new study should supplant the IOM estimates from 1999. That means hospitals are killing off the equivalent of the entire population of Atlanta one year, Miami the next, then moving to Oakland, and on and on.

And how about the long waits? Why aren't Americans getting the treatment in these hospitals they need?

What country endures such long waits for medical care that even one of its top insurers recently admitted that care is "not timely" and people "initially diagnosed with cancer are waiting over a month, which is intolerable?"

If you guessed Canada, guess again. The answer is the United States...

But, here's the dirty little secret that they won't tell you. Waiting times in the U.S. are as bad as or worse than Canada. And, unlike the U.S., in Canada no one is denied needed medical care, referrals, or diagnostic tests due to cost, pre-existing conditions, or because it wasn't pre-approved.

U.S. waiting times are like the elephant in the room few of the critics care to address. Listen to what the chief medical officer of Aetna had to say in March.

Speaking to the Aetna Investor's Conference 2007, Troy Brennan let these nuggets drop:

The U.S. "healthcare system is not timely."
Recent statistics from the Institution of Healthcare Improvement document "that people are waiting an average of about 70 days to see a provider."
"In many circumstances people initially diagnosed with cancer are waiting over a month, which is intolerable."
In his former stint as an administrator and head of a physicians' organization he spent much of his time trying "to find appointments for people with doctors."...

Business Week, no great fan of a national healthcare system, reported in late June that "as several surveys and numerous anecdotes show, waiting times in the U.S. are often as bad or worse as those in other industrialized nations -- despite the fact that the U.S. spends considerably more per capita on health care than any other country."

A Commonwealth Fund study of six highly industrialized countries, the U.S., and five nations with national health systems, Britain, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, found waiting times were worse in the U.S. than in all the other countries except Canada.

But, there's something else you probably don't hear about Canada. Substantial progress is being made.

But here's the kicker. It's the same problem in Canada as the US.

Most of the wait times problems derive from funding cuts by conservative national or provincial governments, or from the siphoning off of resources by private providers. But precisely because the Canadian system is publicly administered, Canadians are able to force their elected officials to fix problems, or get voted out of office.

So it looks like I was right all along...Despite the recent inexcuseable glitch, the VA health care system is STILL the best health care available in this country.

Quick. When you read "veterans hospital," what comes to mind? Maybe you recall the headlines from a dozen years ago about the three decomposed bodies found near a veterans medical center in Salem, Va. Two turned out to be the remains of patients who had wandered months before. The other body had been resting in place for more than 15 years. The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) admitted that its search for the missing patients had been "cursory."

Or maybe you recall images from movies like Born on the Fourth of July, in which Tom Cruise plays a wounded Vietnam vet who becomes radicalized by his shabby treatment in a crumbling, rat-infested veterans hospital in the Bronx. Sample dialogue: "This place is a fuckin' slum!"

By the mid-1990s, the reputation of veterans hospitals had sunk so low that conservatives routinely used their example as a kind of reductio ad absurdum critique of any move toward "socialized medicine." Here, for instance, is Jarret B. Wollstein, a right-wing activist/author, railing against the Clinton health-care plan in 1994: "To see the future of health care in America for you and your children under Clinton's plan," Wollstein warned, "just visit any Veterans Administration hospital. You'll find filthy conditions, shortages of everything, and treatment bordering on barbarism."

And so it goes today. If the debate is over health-care reform, it won't be long before some free-market conservative will jump up and say that the sorry shape of the nation's veterans hospitals just proves what happens when government gets into the health-care business. And if he's a true believer, he'll then probably go on to suggest, quoting William Safire and other free marketers, that the government should just shut down the whole miserable system and provide veterans with health-care vouchers.

Yet here's a curious fact that few conservatives or liberals know. Who do you think receives higher-quality health care. Medicare patients who are free to pick their own doctors and specialists? Or aging veterans stuck in those presumably filthy VA hospitals with their antiquated equipment, uncaring administrators, and incompetent staff? An answer came in 2003, when the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine published a study that compared veterans health facilities on 11 measures of quality with fee-for-service Medicare. On all 11 measures, the quality of care in veterans facilities proved to be "significantly better."

Here's another curious fact. The Annals of Internal Medicine recently published a study that compared veterans health facilities with commercial managed-care systems in their treatment of diabetes patients. In seven out of seven measures of quality, the VA provided better care.

It gets stranger. Pushed by large employers who are eager to know what they are buying when they purchase health care for their employees, an outfit called the National Committee for Quality Assurance today ranks health-care plans on 17 different performance measures. These include how well the plans manage high blood pressure or how precisely they adhere to standard protocols of evidence-based medicine such as prescribing beta blockers for patients recovering from a heart attack. Winning NCQA's seal of approval is the gold standard in the health-care industry. And who do you suppose this year's winner is: Johns Hopkins? Mayo Clinic? Massachusetts General? Nope. In every single category, the VHA system outperforms the highest rated non-VHA hospitals.

Not convinced? Consider what vets themselves think. Sure, it's not hard to find vets who complain about difficulties in establishing eligibility. Many are outraged that the Bush administration has decided to deny previously promised health-care benefits to veterans who don't have service-related illnesses or who can't meet a strict means test. Yet these grievances are about access to the system, not about the quality of care received by those who get in. Veterans groups tenaciously defend the VHA and applaud its turnaround. "The quality of care is outstanding," says Peter Gayton, deputy director for veterans affairs and rehabilitation at the American Legion. In the latest independent survey, 81 percent of VHA hospital patients express satisfaction with the care they receive, compared to 77 percent of Medicare and Medicaid patients.

Outside experts agree that the VHA has become an industry leader in its safety and quality measures. Dr. Donald M. Berwick, president of the Institute for Health Care Improvement and one of the nation's top health-care quality experts, praises the VHA's information technology as "spectacular." The venerable Institute of Medicine notes that the VHA's "integrated health information system, including its framework for using performance measures to improve quality, is considered one of the best in the nation."

 

[Howey]

howey.......isn't it time for your daily fudge packing?? ..

why can't i neg this schmuck?

 

[westwall]

Where's all the outrage over this? Why aren't Republicans and teabaggers demanding that every hospital administrator and doctor in the country be fired?

40 deaths for the VA? That's chicken feed!

In 1999, Americans learned that 98,000 people were dying every year from preventable errors in hospitals. That came from a widely touted analysis by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) called To Err Is Human. This was the “Silent Spring” of the health care world, grabbing headlines for revealing a serious and deadly problem that required policy and action.

As it turns out, those were the good old days.

According to a new study just out from the prestigious Journal of Patient Safety, four times as many people die from preventable medical errors than we thought, as many as 440,000 a year.

Back in the old days, the IOM experts had very little concrete information to use in estimating the extent of killer errors in hospitals. But with innovations in research techniques led by Dr. David Classen, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and others, we now have more tools to tell us where the bodies are buried.

With these latest revelations, medical errors now claim the spot as the third leading cause of death in the United States, dwarfing auto accidents, diabetes and everything else besides Cancer and heart disease. Harvard’s Dr. Lucian Leape, the father of the patient safety movement and one of the experts behind the original IOM report, says the numbers in this new study should supplant the IOM estimates from 1999. That means hospitals are killing off the equivalent of the entire population of Atlanta one year, Miami the next, then moving to Oakland, and on and on.

And how about the long waits? Why aren't Americans getting the treatment in these hospitals they need?

What country endures such long waits for medical care that even one of its top insurers recently admitted that care is "not timely" and people "initially diagnosed with cancer are waiting over a month, which is intolerable?"

If you guessed Canada, guess again. The answer is the United States...

But, here's the dirty little secret that they won't tell you. Waiting times in the U.S. are as bad as or worse than Canada. And, unlike the U.S., in Canada no one is denied needed medical care, referrals, or diagnostic tests due to cost, pre-existing conditions, or because it wasn't pre-approved.

U.S. waiting times are like the elephant in the room few of the critics care to address. Listen to what the chief medical officer of Aetna had to say in March.

Speaking to the Aetna Investor's Conference 2007, Troy Brennan let these nuggets drop:

The U.S. "healthcare system is not timely."
Recent statistics from the Institution of Healthcare Improvement document "that people are waiting an average of about 70 days to see a provider."
"In many circumstances people initially diagnosed with cancer are waiting over a month, which is intolerable."
In his former stint as an administrator and head of a physicians' organization he spent much of his time trying "to find appointments for people with doctors."...

Business Week, no great fan of a national healthcare system, reported in late June that "as several surveys and numerous anecdotes show, waiting times in the U.S. are often as bad or worse as those in other industrialized nations -- despite the fact that the U.S. spends considerably more per capita on health care than any other country."

A Commonwealth Fund study of six highly industrialized countries, the U.S., and five nations with national health systems, Britain, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, found waiting times were worse in the U.S. than in all the other countries except Canada.

But, there's something else you probably don't hear about Canada. Substantial progress is being made.

But here's the kicker. It's the same problem in Canada as the US.

Most of the wait times problems derive from funding cuts by conservative national or provincial governments, or from the siphoning off of resources by private providers. But precisely because the Canadian system is publicly administered, Canadians are able to force their elected officials to fix problems, or get voted out of office.

So it looks like I was right all along...Despite the recent inexcuseable glitch, the VA health care system is STILL the best health care available in this country.

Quick. When you read "veterans hospital," what comes to mind? Maybe you recall the headlines from a dozen years ago about the three decomposed bodies found near a veterans medical center in Salem, Va. Two turned out to be the remains of patients who had wandered months before. The other body had been resting in place for more than 15 years. The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) admitted that its search for the missing patients had been "cursory."

Or maybe you recall images from movies like Born on the Fourth of July, in which Tom Cruise plays a wounded Vietnam vet who becomes radicalized by his shabby treatment in a crumbling, rat-infested veterans hospital in the Bronx. Sample dialogue: "This place is a fuckin' slum!"

By the mid-1990s, the reputation of veterans hospitals had sunk so low that conservatives routinely used their example as a kind of reductio ad absurdum critique of any move toward "socialized medicine." Here, for instance, is Jarret B. Wollstein, a right-wing activist/author, railing against the Clinton health-care plan in 1994: "To see the future of health care in America for you and your children under Clinton's plan," Wollstein warned, "just visit any Veterans Administration hospital. You'll find filthy conditions, shortages of everything, and treatment bordering on barbarism."

And so it goes today. If the debate is over health-care reform, it won't be long before some free-market conservative will jump up and say that the sorry shape of the nation's veterans hospitals just proves what happens when government gets into the health-care business. And if he's a true believer, he'll then probably go on to suggest, quoting William Safire and other free marketers, that the government should just shut down the whole miserable system and provide veterans with health-care vouchers.

Yet here's a curious fact that few conservatives or liberals know. Who do you think receives higher-quality health care. Medicare patients who are free to pick their own doctors and specialists? Or aging veterans stuck in those presumably filthy VA hospitals with their antiquated equipment, uncaring administrators, and incompetent staff? An answer came in 2003, when the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine published a study that compared veterans health facilities on 11 measures of quality with fee-for-service Medicare. On all 11 measures, the quality of care in veterans facilities proved to be "significantly better."

Here's another curious fact. The Annals of Internal Medicine recently published a study that compared veterans health facilities with commercial managed-care systems in their treatment of diabetes patients. In seven out of seven measures of quality, the VA provided better care.

It gets stranger. Pushed by large employers who are eager to know what they are buying when they purchase health care for their employees, an outfit called the National Committee for Quality Assurance today ranks health-care plans on 17 different performance measures. These include how well the plans manage high blood pressure or how precisely they adhere to standard protocols of evidence-based medicine such as prescribing beta blockers for patients recovering from a heart attack. Winning NCQA's seal of approval is the gold standard in the health-care industry. And who do you suppose this year's winner is: Johns Hopkins? Mayo Clinic? Massachusetts General? Nope. In every single category, the VHA system outperforms the highest rated non-VHA hospitals.

Not convinced? Consider what vets themselves think. Sure, it's not hard to find vets who complain about difficulties in establishing eligibility. Many are outraged that the Bush administration has decided to deny previously promised health-care benefits to veterans who don't have service-related illnesses or who can't meet a strict means test. Yet these grievances are about access to the system, not about the quality of care received by those who get in. Veterans groups tenaciously defend the VHA and applaud its turnaround. "The quality of care is outstanding," says Peter Gayton, deputy director for veterans affairs and rehabilitation at the American Legion. In the latest independent survey, 81 percent of VHA hospital patients express satisfaction with the care they receive, compared to 77 percent of Medicare and Medicaid patients.

Outside experts agree that the VHA has become an industry leader in its safety and quality measures. Dr. Donald M. Berwick, president of the Institute for Health Care Improvement and one of the nation's top health-care quality experts, praises the VHA's information technology as "spectacular." The venerable Institute of Medicine notes that the VHA's "integrated health information system, including its framework for using performance measures to improve quality, is considered one of the best in the nation."

Wow. That means, by the number provided by you....a person is WAAAAAAYYY more likely to die at the hands of a doctor than from the barrel of a gun. Good to know. And as regards the OP, I agree. Of course the VA handles a lot fewer people and is government run, so according to you is supposedly way better than anything else out there. And the 40 are from ONE VA hospital, we have no idea what the losses are country wide, but hey. Keep on comparing apples with pizza's. You're good at that.

 

[JakeStarkey]

VA care is generally better than for-profit care, much less the non-profits.

Sunni Man cannot be negged because he has no rep. Ask him privately why that it is so.

 

[Howey]

Where's all the outrage over this? Why aren't Republicans and teabaggers demanding that every hospital administrator and doctor in the country be fired?

40 deaths for the VA? That's chicken feed!

In 1999, Americans learned that 98,000 people were dying every year from preventable errors in hospitals. That came from a widely touted analysis by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) called To Err Is Human. This was the “Silent Spring” of the health care world, grabbing headlines for revealing a serious and deadly problem that required policy and action.

As it turns out, those were the good old days.

According to a new study just out from the prestigious Journal of Patient Safety, four times as many people die from preventable medical errors than we thought, as many as 440,000 a year.

Back in the old days, the IOM experts had very little concrete information to use in estimating the extent of killer errors in hospitals. But with innovations in research techniques led by Dr. David Classen, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and others, we now have more tools to tell us where the bodies are buried.

With these latest revelations, medical errors now claim the spot as the third leading cause of death in the United States, dwarfing auto accidents, diabetes and everything else besides Cancer and heart disease. Harvard’s Dr. Lucian Leape, the father of the patient safety movement and one of the experts behind the original IOM report, says the numbers in this new study should supplant the IOM estimates from 1999. That means hospitals are killing off the equivalent of the entire population of Atlanta one year, Miami the next, then moving to Oakland, and on and on.

And how about the long waits? Why aren't Americans getting the treatment in these hospitals they need?



But here's the kicker. It's the same problem in Canada as the US.




So it looks like I was right all along...Despite the recent inexcuseable glitch, the VA health care system is STILL the best health care available in this country.

Quick. When you read "veterans hospital," what comes to mind? Maybe you recall the headlines from a dozen years ago about the three decomposed bodies found near a veterans medical center in Salem, Va. Two turned out to be the remains of patients who had wandered months before. The other body had been resting in place for more than 15 years. The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) admitted that its search for the missing patients had been "cursory."

Or maybe you recall images from movies like Born on the Fourth of July, in which Tom Cruise plays a wounded Vietnam vet who becomes radicalized by his shabby treatment in a crumbling, rat-infested veterans hospital in the Bronx. Sample dialogue: "This place is a fuckin' slum!"

By the mid-1990s, the reputation of veterans hospitals had sunk so low that conservatives routinely used their example as a kind of reductio ad absurdum critique of any move toward "socialized medicine." Here, for instance, is Jarret B. Wollstein, a right-wing activist/author, railing against the Clinton health-care plan in 1994: "To see the future of health care in America for you and your children under Clinton's plan," Wollstein warned, "just visit any Veterans Administration hospital. You'll find filthy conditions, shortages of everything, and treatment bordering on barbarism."

And so it goes today. If the debate is over health-care reform, it won't be long before some free-market conservative will jump up and say that the sorry shape of the nation's veterans hospitals just proves what happens when government gets into the health-care business. And if he's a true believer, he'll then probably go on to suggest, quoting William Safire and other free marketers, that the government should just shut down the whole miserable system and provide veterans with health-care vouchers.

Yet here's a curious fact that few conservatives or liberals know. Who do you think receives higher-quality health care. Medicare patients who are free to pick their own doctors and specialists? Or aging veterans stuck in those presumably filthy VA hospitals with their antiquated equipment, uncaring administrators, and incompetent staff? An answer came in 2003, when the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine published a study that compared veterans health facilities on 11 measures of quality with fee-for-service Medicare. On all 11 measures, the quality of care in veterans facilities proved to be "significantly better."

Here's another curious fact. The Annals of Internal Medicine recently published a study that compared veterans health facilities with commercial managed-care systems in their treatment of diabetes patients. In seven out of seven measures of quality, the VA provided better care.

It gets stranger. Pushed by large employers who are eager to know what they are buying when they purchase health care for their employees, an outfit called the National Committee for Quality Assurance today ranks health-care plans on 17 different performance measures. These include how well the plans manage high blood pressure or how precisely they adhere to standard protocols of evidence-based medicine such as prescribing beta blockers for patients recovering from a heart attack. Winning NCQA's seal of approval is the gold standard in the health-care industry. And who do you suppose this year's winner is: Johns Hopkins? Mayo Clinic? Massachusetts General? Nope. In every single category, the VHA system outperforms the highest rated non-VHA hospitals.

Not convinced? Consider what vets themselves think. Sure, it's not hard to find vets who complain about difficulties in establishing eligibility. Many are outraged that the Bush administration has decided to deny previously promised health-care benefits to veterans who don't have service-related illnesses or who can't meet a strict means test. Yet these grievances are about access to the system, not about the quality of care received by those who get in. Veterans groups tenaciously defend the VHA and applaud its turnaround. "The quality of care is outstanding," says Peter Gayton, deputy director for veterans affairs and rehabilitation at the American Legion. In the latest independent survey, 81 percent of VHA hospital patients express satisfaction with the care they receive, compared to 77 percent of Medicare and Medicaid patients.

Outside experts agree that the VHA has become an industry leader in its safety and quality measures. Dr. Donald M. Berwick, president of the Institute for Health Care Improvement and one of the nation's top health-care quality experts, praises the VHA's information technology as "spectacular." The venerable Institute of Medicine notes that the VHA's "integrated health information system, including its framework for using performance measures to improve quality, is considered one of the best in the nation."

Wow. That means, by the number provided by you....a person is WAAAAAAYYY more likely to di at the hands of a doctor than from the barrel of a gun. Good to know. And as regards the OP, I agree. Of course the VA handles a lot fewer people and is government run, so according to you is supposedly way better than anything else out there. And the 40 are from NE VA hospital, we have no idea what the losses are country wide, but hey. Keep on comparing apples with pizza's. You're good at that.

You're quite the tard, aren't you Westfail?

Read my second link.

 

[Harry Dresden]

VA care is generally better than for-profit care, much less the non-profits.

Sunni Man cannot be negged because he has no rep. Ask him privately why that it is so.

it must be like any Medical place....some are good,some are bad.....where i am at lots of Vets say Long Beach is pretty good.....we just had a Vet get beaten to Death at the Loma Linda Hospital because he was trying to leave and get to Long Beach....

VA hospital police caused fatal blow on vet who grew tired of waiting - Washington Times