Reply #15: WSJ: For quality, it's hard to top veterans' health care

[pinboy3niner]

ETA: Just noticed that sinkingfeeling already provided this link (curse you, sinkingfeeling! :)). My bad! Coming from the conservative WSJ, this should be a good one to pass on to your friend.

Source: The Wall Street Journal
June 2, 2010, 12:01 a.m. EDT

For quality, it's hard to top veterans' health care
By Kristen Gerencher, MarketWatch


SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Where can you find the highest quality health care in the U.S.? There isn't one single answer, but believe it or not, many studies and independent experts point to the Veterans Health Administration as among the best.
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Some other health systems also provide excellent patient care, and every place has it weaknesses, but the VA generally stands out on quality, said Elizabeth McGlynn, associate director of Rand Health, a division of the Rand Corp., in Santa Monica, Calif.

"You're much better off in the VA than in a lot of the rest of the U.S. health-care system," she said. "You've got a fighting chance there's going to be some organized, thoughtful, evidence-based response to dealing effectively with the health problem that somebody brings to them."

The combination of its information system and support tools, routine performance reporting and financial incentives for managers who hit quality targets gives it an edge, said McGlynn, who co-authored a comparative study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2004 that found the VA outperformed its community health-care counterparts by 20 percentage points in preventive care. It also performed significantly better on chronic disease care and in overall quality.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/its-hard-to-top-veterans-health-care-2010-06-02

The article notes the irony that the VA is ahead of the private sector in applying principles of supply and demand to provide a cost-efficient, quality health care system.

Phillip Longman, senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of a book about the VA called "Best Care Anywhere," underscores that irony. He observes that the VA is run by a sprawling federal agency, has five public-sector labor unions and a patient population that tends to be older, sicker and poorer than average.