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THE VA THEY AIN'T. Reader RN writes in to say:
Walter Reed is an Army hospital, not a VA facility. As an active duty soldier, the care I received at Evans Army Community Hospital (the Army hospital in Colorado Springs) was best described as mediocre; the care I've received at the VA Medical Center in Denver (especially after I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis) is outstanding.The press corps has done a very, very poor job explaining this, but Walter Reed and the other hospitals being criticized are military hospitals, not veteran's hospitals (VA). They are run by the military, not the Veteran's Administration, which is why the Secretary of the Army, rather than the Secretary of Veteran's Affairs, was cut loose. The VA system has made remarkable strides in the past decade, and is now the best hospital system in the nation, beating out such gold standard institutions as the Mayo and Cleveland Clinics. As Phil Longman writes, "A RAND Corporation study published in the The Annals of Internal Medicine concludes that the VA outperforms all other sectors of American health care in 294 measures of quality. In awarding the VA a top prize in 2006 for innovation in government, Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government gushed that "While the costs of healthcare continue to soar for most Americans, the VA is reducing costs, reducing errors, and becoming the model for what modern health care management and delivery should look like." The military hospitals, sadly, have not enjoyed the same rennaisance. --Ezra Klein
