The Sacred & The Profane: An Experiment On The VA Health System

The recent debacle in the Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics has ran rampant for several years and its exposure is just reaching the pinnacle of more troubling news. The VA represents a very large demographics of health, healthcare, health delivery and other various health challenges with outputs that can be readily applicable to the "civilian" health delivery system. Their data represents a "proxy" for the civilian healthcare system as a real dual sample. However, the stories coming out of both Georgia and now Phoenix, Arizona are most disturbing where veterans are placed on a "secret list" and made to wait horribly long periods of time. The list states the patients will be seen within 2 weeks while in fact they are left to wait up to over a year for serious medical conditions and in many instances literally "dying" as they wait to get in. Speaking as a past VA physician and an ex-military personnel , I feel that our veterans deserve the upmost care for their service above and beyond their country's call of duty. But, when new systems can use these large demographics to provide data for either epidemiologic studies or actuarial assistance to improve budgetary concerns as in this case, the VA hospitals are an easy target to be cut as just a routine study in the failure of a badly run system. In the Arizona case the long wait periods were explained as occurring to enhance the appearance of efficiency and improve the bottom line for the hospitals. Veterans with multiple chronic illnesses and PTSD are seen as a useless burden on a system that sees prices rising. But, this brazen acceptable sub-standard practice in the VA is akin to socialized programs where many patients have healthcare "rationed" or withheld . Many healthcare systems throughout Europe and Canada must agree to an acceptable number of morbidity and mortality, this is almost tantamount to a slow euthanasia, but healthcare systems are merely pragmatic operations in which a utilitarian mode is paramount. These are all symptomatic of socialized medicine. Many of the acute and chronic ailments that veterans have can be quite extensive and without these benefits their healthcare would run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars personally. To some with political aims this could appear "burdensome" to an already very top heavy healthcare system costing 2 Trillion $USD annually. But, if this epidemic happening in one of the government's largest healthcare systems continues, one could only imagine that this must be either a poorly run system or that it was pre-planned to happen this way. This means that if this can happen with the VA healthcare delivery it can also happen with Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare or any other government run healthcare system regardless of how much digital technology is guiding it. The only other possibility is that this debacle represents some type of "study" or what some may call "experiment" to see if this type of benefits-run operation is most or least sustainable. It is profane to disregard human life in this manner, but the we mustn't forget the sacred reason why veterans have sacrificed so much for this country.