By Steve Benen
Mitt Romney spent part of his Veterans’ Day in Maudlin, South Carolina, visiting with a dozen vets, and
wandering into some dangerous policy waters.
Talking with the veterans about the challenge of navigating the Veterans Affairs bureaucracy to get their health care benefits after they leave active duty, Romney suggested a way to improve the system would be to privatize it.
“Sometimes you wonder, would there be some way to introduce some private sector competition, somebody else that could come in and say, you know each soldier gets X thousand dollars attributed to them and then they can choose whether they want to go on the government system or the private system and then it follows them, like what happens with schools in Florida where they have a voucher that follows them, who knows.”
Even the most conservative Republicans rarely venture into privatizing veterans’ health care benefits. Last year, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Colorado went there, but it was problematic enough that his campaign
quickly walked it back.
And I wouldn’t be too surprised if Romney’s team does the same today.
In the meantime, Romney’s willingness to voucherize veterans’ care should be a pretty big deal. For the
Washington Monthly, this has been a long-time area of interest — in 2005, we published a Philip Longman piece on V.A. hospitals called, “
The Best Care Anywhere.”
As Longman explained at the time, “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.’ … 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.”
more
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
