Keep Your Voucher Culture Off My VA

I'm telling you, if Republicans could finagle a way to issue vouchers for breathing they would.

Vouchers for school choice; vouchers replacing Medicare; vouchers for senior services. Now Mitt Romney wants to replace Veterans Administration health care with vouchers.

Now I'm not anti-voucher per se. Sometimes subsidizing market choices make more sense than traditional government-run programs. Like when something is beyond broken; like public schools.

But the VA? I love my VA. I receive my primary care at the New Port Richey Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Outpatient Clinic. I've also spent time in VHA hospitals and emergency rooms in Iowa and Buffalo and utilized its clinics in Ft. Myers and St. Petersburg. The caregivers have always been prompt, professional and courteous. My current GP is the best doctor I've had in my entire life.

I'm not alone in my appraisal. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, the RAND Corporation and the National Committee for Quality Assurance, among others, the VHA comes out on top of virtually every study of health care providers ranking quality, safety, efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

What's more, five million veterans using VHA services give it a rating of 85 compared to private sector patients' rating of 79 for their health services.

Critics of so-called Obamacare claim it's socialism. Far from it. The VHA, that's socialism! There's limited patient choice of caregivers who are all government employees. All the facilities are government-owned. All costs, medical procedures and records management are contained in-house. And know what? It's working and working well.

The most important reason for the VHA's success is its implementation during the 1990s of electronic medical records that virtually eliminated prescription dispensing and surgical errors and provide instant patient data for identification, evaluation, charting, treatment and, most importantly, routine tracking and follow-up. That along with its team approach to health care and emphasis on wellness distinguishes the VHA from for-profit providers.

In fact many of the provisions of Obamacare, like universal electronic recordkeeping and accent on primary care, are included because the VHA proved their effectiveness.

As Phillip Longman discusses in his book, "Best Care Anywhere:" "This technology has helped the VHA achieve cost controls and care quality the majority of fee-for-service providers cannot achieve.

"In fact precisely because the VHA is a big, government-run system with an exclusive lifetime relationship with its patients, it has the financial incentives to invest in more effective prevention, disease management and the electronic recordkeeping that for fee-for-service providers would take money straight from their bottom line."

Republicans insistence that more choice and more competition bring down health care costs and improve quality of care is simply erroneous. But so what! Facts are no match for ideological delusions. Vouchers, good. Government, bad.