"The Best Medical Care In The U.S."

(Crossposted in a diary entry at DailyKos)

~~~ DISCLAIMER: I WORK FOR THE VA ~~~

The July 17th edition of Business Week [that publication known for its wacky, liberal agenda **cough**] magazine just came out with a big article on how Veterans Affairs gives the best medical care in the United States.

How about that? The VA. Single-payer, government-provided healthcare... is the best. This "socialized medicine," as it turns out, is a misnomer -- it's actually "efficient medicine." I suppose could go into the economic theory, definitions and esoterica explaining why publicly-provided healthcare makes sense, but... not now.

Onward!

Let me simply give you some blurbs from the article:

LOWER COSTS, HIGHER QUALITY

The 154 hospitals and 875 clinics run by the Veterans Affairs Dept. have been ranked best-in-class by a number of independent groups on a broad range of measures, from chronic care to heart disease treatment to percentage of members who receive flu shots. It offers all the same services, and sometimes more, than private sector providers.

According to a Rand Corp. study, the VA system provides two-thirds of the care recommended by such standards bodies as the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality. Far from perfect, granted -- but the nation's private-sector hospitals provide only 50%. And while studies show that 3% to 8% of the nation's prescriptions are filled erroneously, the VA's prescription accuracy rate is greater than 99.997%, a level most hospitals only dream about. That's largely because the VA has by far the most advanced computerized medical-records system in the U.S. And for the past six years the VA has outranked private-sector hospitals on patient satisfaction in an annual consumer survey conducted by the National Quality Research Center at the University of Michigan. This keeps happening despite the fact that the VA spends an average of $5,000 per patient, vs. the national average of $6,300.

Ok then. Works better for less money.

MIGHTY FORCE FOR CHANGE

A nationwide health-care network that gets its funding from a single payer can institute mighty changes. Proponents of national health-care reform extrapolate even further. "The VA proves that you can get better results with an integrated, organized, national health-care system," says Dr. Lucian Leape, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and a leading expert on hospital safety. "We will not achieve even close to the level of quality and safety we need [in the U.S.] as long as we have individual practitioners and hospitals doing individual things."

The VA is, in many ways, the exact opposite of America's fragmented private-sector system, where doctors work for hospitals as independent contractors, and third-party insurers pay the bills as they see fit.

Jeepers. What else?

Because it treats patients throughout their lives, it can invest in prevention and primary care, knowing it will reap the benefits of lower long-term costs. Because the government pays the bills, the VA doesn't have to waste time or money on claims-related paperwork. Unlike Medicare, the VA is allowed to negotiate prices with drug companies and other suppliers, and it uses that power aggressively. The consumer group Families USA estimates that Medicare Part D enrollees, on average, pay 46% more than the VA for the same drugs.

The VA also gets to keep any money it saves through cost efficiencies. In the private sector the savings flow back to whoever is paying the bills.

Zoinks. I'll bet the caregivers suck, huh?

That doesn't mean it's settling for second-rate physicians. Among the VA staff is a Nobel prize winner, and clinical research is conducted throughout the system. The Buffalo VA recently hired one of the city's top surgeons, Dr. Miguel A. Rainstein, as chief of surgery. He had spent 26 years in private practice, where, he concedes, he made a lot more money, but he was ready for a lifestyle change. "I feel the VA has always gotten a bad rap. They have an excellent medical staff here, in surgery and in specialties."

The staff is happier, too, since much of the bureaucracy that once hobbled the organization has been streamlined.

Oh - guess not.

... here's the part that I normally work with - the VistA system:

The centerpiece of that culture is VistA, the VA's much praised electronic medical-records system. Every office visit, prescription, and medical procedure is recorded in its database, allowing doctors and nurses to update themselves on a patient's status with just a few keystrokes. In 1995, patient records at VA hospitals were available at the time of a clinical encounter only 60% of the time. Today they are 100% available. Some 96% of all prescriptions and medical orders, such as lab tests, are now entered electronically. The national comparison is more like 8%. "One out of five tests in a civilian hospital have to be repeated because the paper results are lost," says Veterans Affairs Secretary R. James Nicholson. "That's not happening in our hospitals." VistA is a big reason why the VA has held its costs per patient steady over the past 10 years despite double-digit inflation in health-care prices.

VistA has also turned out be a powerful force for quality control. The VA uses the data gathered in its computers to pinpoint problem areas, such as medication errors. The network also allows it to track how closely the medical staff is following evidence-based treatment and monitor deficiencies. Such tracking pays off. When Rand did an extensive study comparing quality of care at the VA with private-sector hospitals, it found that performance measurement played an important role in helping the VA score higher in every category except acute care, where it came in about even.

Pretty spiffy, huh?

...

There's much more to the article; read up!

The whole thing is right here.

Single-payer. Publicly-provided. That's the future of healthcare that WORKS.