Reader Rich wrote to point out Bob Lonsberry's March 7 column, where he asks the same question that I asked last month: Why do Veterans have a separate and unequal healthcare delivery system? Bob's column adds another angle, pointing out that medicaid recipients are entitled to care in any facility, yet Veterans aren't.
In his appearance on This Week yesterday, Bob Dole made a similar, though more narrow point:
I haven't made any judgments, but it seems to me that, if the V.A. is not equipped and Department of Defense hospitals are not equipped to deal with these very complex, say, brain injuries, then they ought to go to some private hospital where they are equipped and where they've been doing it for 30, 40, 50 years.
Dole is the co-chair of President Bush's new "Wounded Warriors" commission that will look into issues with health care delivery to wounded soldiers.
Comments
I had a similar discussion with coworkers about 15 years ago. The only explanation we could come up with for two health care systems--one for civilians and one for military--was that our government does not want the masses to know of the hideous devastation of war on soldiers.
It seems with VA hospitals disappearing and regular hospitals closing, the logical solution would be to blend the VA hospitals into regular hospitals.
I think it all started during and after WWII, when the number of wounded soldiers was too many for civilian hospitals. After the VA system started, it became self-perpetuating.