To begin with, as most people in this debate don’t seem to know - TopicsExpress



          

To begin with, as most people in this debate don’t seem to know or care to remember, the VA already engages in extensive outsourcing of medical services. For example, under the Bush Administration, the VA began contracting with Humana to provide care to veterans in rural areas, a program that continues under the Access Received Closer to Home project. In 2009, the Senate Veterans Affairs committee determined that the VA was already outsourcing some $3 billion year to private providers. “Contract physicians and nurses lack the specialized skills and best practices of clinicians who dedicate their lives to serving the veteran population as VA employees,” complained Alma Lee, National VA Council President for the American Federation of Government Employees. “Excessive contracting out has put many medical centers in the red, without benefitting the patient.” Now to be sure, some of this outsourcing makes sense. It’s not cost-effective to maintain VA hospitals or even clinics in many remote areas. Due to the declining population of veterans, the VA lacks a sufficient volume of patients even in some developed areas to be able to justify using its own specialists. But even at its current scale, the outsourcing of VA care has already been fraught with problems. One comes from just the generic hazards of government contracting. In 2009, the VA Inspector General (pdf) found that 37 percent of the $3.2 billion the VA had paid out the year before to private health care providers was improperly paid. Not only does outsourcing create new administrative costs and burdens for procuring and managing contracts. It also opens up opportunities for crony deals and all the kinds fraudulent billing by private doctors that bedevils Medicare and Medicaid.
Posted on: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 20:10:31 +0000

Trending Topics



Recently Viewed Topics




© 2015