NEW YORK TIMES: Dr. Phyllis Hollenbeck, a primary care physician, took a job at the Veterans Affairs medical center in Jackson, Miss., in 2008 expecting fulfilling work and a lighter patient load than she had had in private practice.
What she found was quite different: 13-hour workdays fueled by large patient loads that kept growing as colleagues quit and were not replaced.
Appalled by what she saw, Dr. Hollenbeck filed a whistle-blower complaint and changed jobs. A subsequent investigation by the Department of Veterans Affairs concluded last fall that indeed the Jackson hospital did not have enough primary care doctors, resulting in nurse practitioners’ handling far too many complex cases and in numerous complaints from veterans about delayed care. “It was unethical to put us in that position,” Dr. Hollenbeck said of the overstressed primary care unit in Jackson. “Your heart gets broken.”… (more)
EDITOR: Both Congress and the Administration deserve blame for the apparent wretched treatment of veterans.
That said, the VA is another casualty of the foolish war in Iraq and an attempt a nation building in Afghanistan.
What the VA did, while it makes us angry, is reality. It makes sense. It’s called rationing and we are going to see a lot more of it.
EDITOR: If we did away with our unique and exorbitant approach to health care and followed the lead of all of the other advanced nations of the world, there would be ample funds to vastly improve treatment of those in need.
As it is, we are funding insurance companies and health care networks rather than medical providers.