> The VA was a good system not too long ago, but the past couple decades decades has seen it get extremely underfunded in a starve the beast strategy. It used to be a black eye in the Republican's view of healthcare, but they sure fixed that.
While it's tempting to blame any failure of national healthcare on Republicans, this is simply not factually accurate.
It's been at least two generations since the VA was anything resembling a good model for healthcare, and it's not simply the Republicans to blame for that, nor is it merely a problem of funding.
I mean, sure, the defunding started in the early 80s with Reagan, but we only started to see the effects of that in the past 20 years or so.
And sure, I blame the neoliberal third way Democrats as much as the Republicans. Their whole "let's move the party right and follow the Republicans" really muddies the waters here.
> I mean, sure, the defunding started in the early 80s with Reagan, but we only started to see the effects of that in the past 20 years or so.
The problems with the VA date back to the 60s, although they've accelerated in the last couple of decades.
> And sure, I blame the neoliberal third way Democrats as much as the Republicans. Their whole "let's move the party right and follow the Republicans" really muddies the waters here.
It sounds like you're rather committed to the belief that right-wing ideology is responsible for destroying otherwise-viable public healthcare models. There are plenty of other places where the data might support that belief. The VA is not one of those cases; the VA has gone from bad to worse over the last 50 years, and it's not simply a partisan problem.
"Quality of Care in VA Health System Compares Well to Other Health Settings"
A lot of the bad press around it's deficiencies are because it, as a public institution, publishes a lot of information that the private healthcare system isn't required to publish.
And yes, having been from Newt Gingrich's district, and seeing the failed 1994 HEART act, that ended up being turned into Romneycare, and then morphed into the ACA (in order to steal the Republican's thunder in 2012), yes I do blame the right wing for the current state of healthcare.
> First off, the VA isn't as bad as you're making it out to be.
From your own link, which is a press release by the firm which sponsored the research:
> Researchers say there were few studies [included in this meta-analyis] to evaluate equity, efficiency and patient-centeredness, and that the quality of the available studies vary.
Incidentally, those are three of the four main issues for which people typically criticize the VA.
In other words, that meta-analysis more or less confirms that the VA probably does well at the things people already knew it was good at doing, without looking into any of the areas where it's known to have problems.
> From your own link, which is a press release by the firm which sponsored the research:
I mean, it's the Rand Corporation. It's not like it's some fly by night 'you pay us and we'll say whatever you want' firm. The link to the real study is right there.
> Incidentally, those are three of the four main issues for which people typically criticize the VA.
That statement was for the whole study, including the private side. Once again, the VA publishes quite a bit of this information, when was the last time you saw average wait times for the private side?
> I mean, it's the Rand Corporation. It's not like it's some fly by night 'you pay us and we'll say whatever you want' firm.
...okay? The point is that the primary reference itself shows that the study isn't relevant to this conversation at all: by its own account, it doesn't attempt to investigate the issues that we're talking about. It doesn't attempt to study the issues that make the VA a bad model for healthcare (and have since the 60s).
While it's tempting to blame any failure of national healthcare on Republicans, this is simply not factually accurate.
It's been at least two generations since the VA was anything resembling a good model for healthcare, and it's not simply the Republicans to blame for that, nor is it merely a problem of funding.