re: I don't like the fact that Shulkin was unanimously confirmed as VA Secretary

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I do ont understand why we can't just give veterans vouchers/health funding payments that they can use at any private facility.

Why do we need a completely different health service for people who were in the armed forces?

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That's what we want them to do ... they are doing it in special cases now but not enough.

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I do ont understand why we can't just give veterans vouchers/health funding payments that they can use at any private facility.

Why do we need a completely different health service for people who were in the armed forces?

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The specialists required to deal with veterans' issues would not have capacity if the pool of patients were diluted down to the general population. Thus, the veteran population would suffer as these services would be hard to find and not as effective.

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I do ont understand why we can't just give veterans vouchers/health funding payments that they can use at any private facility.

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Some facilities do offer this. It's called ChoiceCare. Basically if the wait lists for a certain specialty service is too long, vets have an option of seeking care at an outside provider. The VA will approve so many visits, or a procedure/surgery with so many post op visits. We have a decent number of vets do that here as our waitlist is roughly about 2-3months for a clinic visit and 1-2months to schedule a surgery usually for my speciality.

A lot of news stories up here recently regarded that the vets are disgruntled with choicecare. I think some of it in part is that the vets do enjoy the one stop shop aspect of some of the VAMCs.


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As an aside I do think that some of the VA medical do have a niche is somewhat more vet related or combat related issues (PTSD, polytrauma rehab facilities, spinal cord injury) and are known within the community to be the best around. With that said, the private sector could obviously offer these services just wouldn't be as directed focus. At many of the larger VAMCs are associated with a academic medical center for many specialities so you are essentially getting the same doctors anyway