When Bernie led the cause of getting us funding for more medical staff, it really made a difference. I disagree overall on how they did the staffing (but I'm not a decision maker, I just pay close attention), but I can say this - because of that funding, we became competitive in hiring very high quality physicians and specialists. You cannot imagine how many physicians are walking away from their private practice and coming to the VA. On the outside, they have to manage the building and maintaining of their practice, they have to bill the insurance companies and wait for them to pay, they have to pay for their malpractice insurance (which is very expensive), and they are only compensated a fraction of what they charge based on the patient's insurance. The VA gives them the ability to care for their patients and provides them a salary, good insurance/benefits, they do not have to pay for their own malpractice insurance, and they do not have the overhead of renting office space, paying staff, etc.
Its very interesting to me that many of the physicians I've encountered who are R's, love to work at the VA - which is, if you think about it - socialized medicine. These doctors are working for the federal government for a salary. In my opinion, we already have a great template for universal healthcare - the VA. Just take this system, give it better funding, and roll it out to America. I see it work every day.
Do we have some issues? Of course! And so does the private sector. But we are improving every day and most of our issues are from VOLUME and lack of funding to address the issues related to managing that volume. From what I see, the doctors, specialists and surgeons are very very interested in working for the VA - and we get a huge number of Residents who do their training at the VA and then decide that they want to stay, rather than set up an outside practice. It has made a big difference in the quality of care that we are able to provide.
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