Four Important Observations to Keep in Mind about Veterans’ Health Care

WASHINGTON – Phillip Longman, policy director at Open Markets Institute, presented testimony at the House Veterans' Affairs Committee Hearing on the Role of Infrastructure in Veterans’ Access to Care and Benefits.

In his testimony, Longman urged the Committee to resist efforts to further downsize and privatize the VA hospital system, noting its superior quality of care, importance in providing competition to private health care monopolies, and how it serves the general public during health care emergencies.

Specifically, Longman noted that:

1. Wait times at the the VA have never been longer than in the private sector, and in three out of four specialties evaluated, they are now shorter. Headlines in 2014 about veterans dying while waiting to see a VA doctor were largely untrue and were used to promote a partial privatization of the VA.

2. VA care offers higher quality care at lower cost than private sector care. Outsourcing would lead to poorly coordinated, lower quality care that will harm veterans and will cost taxpayers far more.

3. Instead of shrinking VA health care, we should be expanding its public health mission and giving more people access to it.

4. The widespread cornering of local health care markets by predatory corporate health care giants makes expanding the VA role in the U.S. health care system even more urgent.

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Read Longman’s full testimony here.

Read Open Markets’ report on The Role of Hospital Monopolies in America’s Health Care Crisis here.

Watch a recording of the full hearing here or below: