Word: va
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...VA's medical system, which claims a backlog of $870 million in unmet needs for equipment and $800 million in deferred maintenance and repairs, will lay off 5,000 to 10,000 employees next year, and not all of them will be bureaucrats. As it is, the care-giving staff is stretched so thin on some wards that quadriplegics complain of spending days in bed for lack of anyone to help them up. Gerald Barba, 39, a peacetime Navy veteran who broke his neck in a swimming accident, praises the dedication of the staff at the VA Hospital...
...charge that Congress has balanced the budget on the backs of veterans "just plain mean, disgraceful." He argues that a declining veteran population, coupled with streamlined management and reform of the arcane eligibility rules that keep veterans' hospitals from delivering care in the most efficient way, should enable the VA to maintain its level of service. "Without a balanced federal budget," he adds, "rising interest payments on the national debt would soon crowd out our ability to continue providing for the nation's veterans...
Veterans' advocates and the VA itself agree that relief from congressionally mandated rules that tilt the system toward expensive in-patient care could squeeze far more bang from the buck. (Under the present system, for example, many veterans cannot receive treatment for hypertension as outpatients. They have to wait to be admitted as in-patients for a heart attack or stroke.) But while the House has passed eligibility reform, the Senate...
Given its many Byzantine rules, it's not surprising that the VA has been the health-care provider of last resort for many vets, who turn first to employee benefits, Medicare or Medicaid. But according to estimates announced last week by the VA and the Department of Health and Human Services, as many as 172,000 veterans could lose their Medicaid coverage in 2002. At the same time, increasing premiums and copayments for Medicare could spur an additional 400,000 veterans to head to VA medical centers. The numbers are debatable, but the basic dynamic is not: all three systems...
...People think of the VA as that red brick building up on the hill, where Uncle Charlie died," says Richard Fuller, director of health-policy program development for the Paralyzed Veterans of America. "They don't realize that the VA is an integral part of the health-care network. With the VA budget being cut and Medicare and Medicaid being capped below existing growth rates, you have people going into health-care limbo...