earlier this month, Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance suggested a bigger role for private healthcare in the Department of Veterans Affairs – and it There was a strong reaction from Democrats,
But for some veterans who have had trouble working with the VA in the past, getting the private sector involved is piqued.
“I’ve waited hours for appointments, waited weeks, and traveled over an hour to another state using my own PTO for a 15-minute trip,” Marine veteran Shelby Anderson, who was hurt on base and lost a leg, told the Post.
Anderson described Vance’s remarks as “a breath of fresh air to hear.”
Recent surveys There are signs that the VA’s approval ratings continue to improve — a dramatic turnaround from a decade ago, when the agency was mired in a waiting list scandal.
Still, some issues remain pending. That's far fewer than last year's more than 400,000 claims, but the VA's backlog is more than 240,000. As per the latest data from the department,
“I think there are areas where the VA really does a great job,” Vance said in a recent interview on the “Shawn Ryan Show” podcast“So I wouldn’t say, ‘Get rid of the whole thing.’ But I would say, ‘Give people more choices.’ I think you’ll save money in the process.”
Kate Monroe, a former Marine and CEO of Vetcomms.us, an organization dedicated to helping fellow Marines find work at the VA, argued that any move toward private-sector care should be done with caution.
He said, “If we are going to consider privatizing parts of VA health care, we must first make sure the money doesn't end up in the hands of the same people who are mismanaging the system today.”
John Perry, a veteran of the Army's elite Special Forces, reported that when he got out of the military he had to “wait over two months to schedule the necessary appointments.”
He speculated that, “Privatizing parts of the VA and allowing veterans to choose their own doctors might eliminate some of these problems.”
The VA is already somewhat dependent on private care
Technically, the V.A. relies on the private sector to provide some care to veterans.
About 35% of the VA’s budget for direct care goes to the Veterans Community Care Program — where the VA refers patients to the private sector, according to the report. The Leftist American Prospect,
Jacqueline Simon, policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees, the nation’s largest federal employee union, warned that full privatization of the V.A. would completely destroy care for veterans.
“The VA has developed expertise in dealing with the complexities of veteran patients, and so they won’t always have access to that kind of expertise (in the private sector),” he told the Post.
Simon provided a reference Recent Press Releases which cited studies that concluded that 79% of VA facilities received 4 or 5-star ratings from patients, compared to 40% of hospitals outside the VA.
However, Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the libertarian-minded CATO Institute, opposes this, saying that it would be better for Congress to move toward true privatization, because free market forces would lead to better outcomes for veterans.
“It's a socialized system with no functioning price mechanism. And so you get a wildly misallocation of resources,” he said.
“You’ll get oversupply in some areas, where the VA has excess capacity that no one is using, and you’ll get shortages in other areas, where there are long wait times for care.”
