A Bit of Health Care Wonkery
March 12th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
The depressing scandal at the Army’s Walter Reed Hospital in D.C. is bad enough from a distance, but headlines like this in the Houston Chronicle don’t help: “Lawmaker takes closer look at VA issue.” The sparse article is about U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s visit to a Veterans Affairs-run hospital in Houston in response to the problems at Walter Reed, but it’s the headline, which lumps Walter Reed’s fiasco with the VA, that should concern those interested in promoting national universal health care.
As Phillip Longman of the Washington Monthly notes:
The VA has nothing to do with Walter Reed, which is an Army hospital. That’s why the Secretary of the Army took the fall.
Yet as the author of a Washington Monthly cover story on the VA entitled “Best Care Anywhere” … I know all too well that many people don’t get the distinction. My email box is overflowing with people wondering what I think of the VA now that it has been enveloped in scandal.
From this I conclude many Americans are taking the wrong lesson from the series. If you are left with the impression that Walter Reed is a VA hospital, then it’s just a short leap to concluding that the problems exposed there are indicative of the veterans health care system as a whole. And from that point, conservatives conclude that the whole story just goes to show what happens when the government gets into the health care business…
Look, the VA has its problems. Because the White House and Congress won’t give it the funding to honor past promises to veterans, it now has to limit new enrollments to vets who have service-related illness or who can meet a strict means test. It’s also having trouble ramping up to meet the needs of the unexpectedly large number of young vets diagnosed with mental illness. But despite these challenges, the fact remains that the VA enjoys the highest rate of consumer satisfaction of any American health care system, public or private.
It’s a small point, yes, but damn the devil and his details.
