Those who want to privatize Medicare, Social Security and the Post Office
are at it again. The waitlists for veterans have spawned an attack on the
whole Veterans Administration health system. Those who would turn our
public systems over to profit-making corporations falsely use problems at
the VA to disparage single payer health care.

“If VA care were not generally very good, the VA would not continue to
rank extraordinarily high in independent surveys of patient satisfaction,”
says Phillip Longman, author of a book on the VA, “Best Care Anywhere.”

So we need to fix the problem and bring quick care to the patients–not
destroy the VA. As usual, the best ones to ask are those who do the
work. Here’s what J. David Cox Sr., a former VA nurse and current
National AFGE President, has to say.

Want to End Secret Wait Lists? Staff the VA

J. David Cox Sr.
National President, American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/j-david-cox-sr/want-to-end-secret-wait-va_b_5372387.html

The public’s outrage over excessive wait times and rigged recordkeeping at
Veterans Affairs hospitals is more than justified. As a former VA nurse, I
understand all too well that depriving veterans of timely access to care
is a disservice to them and their sacrifice to this nation.

But cleaning house in the VA’s executive ranks will only treat the
symptom. The disease plaguing the VA healthcare system is chronic
understaffing of physicians and other frontline providers.

Until we fill thousands of vacant positions, open closed hospital beds and
provide more dollars for building and maintaining medical facilities, we
will never heal what ails the VA.

Physicians are dealing with excessive caseloads and insufficient support
staff. Since 2009, 2 million veterans entered the VA health care system
for a net increase of 1.4 million new patients. Each physician should be
responsible for no more than 1,200 patients at a given time, according to
the VA’s own guidelines, yet many VA doctors are treating upwards of 2,000
patients each.

Simply put, there isn’t enough time in the day for the available doctors
to treat every veteran who is seeking care in a timely fashion.

Compounding matters is a performance system that sets unrealistic goals
and incentivizes managers to increase the number of patients served,
instead of improving the quality of care. Rather than face the
understaffing issue head-on and risk poor ratings, many managers have
taken the easy way out and have cooked the books to mask the wait times.

But blaming those managers for a performance system that was doomed from
the start won’t help our veterans get the care they seek any faster.

Truth be told, there is nothing wrong with the VA that can’t be healed by
what is right with the VA: the frontline providers who care for our
veterans every day.

No one is complaining about the quality of care our veterans receive.
That’s because the federal employees who look after our nation’s heroes
work hard each and every day to provide them with world-class service.

Unfortunately, those same employees have lived in fear of speaking out
about the problems they witness due to an established history of
retaliation, including loss of duties and unfounded disciplinary actions.
Our members have paid a heavy price for voicing concerns, submitting
letters to agency leaders, raising issues in labor management meetings,
and testifying before Congress on wait time issues and veterans’ access to
care. When they have sounded the alarm, our members have faced retaliation
and intimidation time and time again.

Employees shouldn’t feel afraid to speak up when they see managers more
concerned with securing bonuses than providing patients with timely access
to care for critical medical conditions. In fact, they should be
encouraged to bring up these issues so they can be rectified before more
veterans go without the treatment they so desperately need.

The waitlist and understaffing issues are one and the same. Until Congress
gives the VA the resources to hire enough frontline clinicians to meet
demand, our veterans will continue to face long waits. And to be clear,
sending veterans to expensive health care providers outside the VA system
on a massive scale will not fix the underlying resource deficiencies
plaguing our veterans medical centers.

According to the Independent Budget for the Department of Veterans
Affairs, developed each year by leading veterans groups, the Veterans
Health Administration is facing a $2 billion funding shortfall for the
upcoming fiscal year and another $500 million shortfall for fiscal 2016.

As the nation prepares to honor our fallen soldiers this Memorial Day,
there is no better time to strengthen our support for the health care
system that treats those veterans who made it home.

It’s time for the VA to get back to basics and focus on improving access
to care for our nation’s veterans.

The agency must cut excess management layers and use those resources to
boost frontline staffing of doctors, nurses and others directly involved
in patient care. The growth of middle management positions within the
agency has ballooned to unprecedented levels, from fewer than 300 in 1995
to more than 1,700 by a recent count, costing taxpayers $203 million
annually.

The VA long has been held up as a model healthcare delivery system that
all other hospitals should emulate. The care our veterans receive is
second to none, but that only counts when our veterans actually are
treated.
—
J. David Cox Sr. is national president of the American Federation of
Government Employees, which represents more than 670,000 federal and D.C.
government employees nationwide
Follow J. David Cox Sr. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JDavidCoxSr
https://www.afge.org/Index.cfm?Page=StaffTheVA

Distributed by:

All Unions Committee for Single Payer Health Care–HR 676
c/o Nurses Professional Organization (NPO)
1169 Eastern Parkway, Suite 2218
Louisville, KY 40217
(502) 636 1551

Email: nursenpo@aol.com
http://unionsforsinglepayer.org
6/9/2014