Good Health(care) BusinessWeek recently published an article on the Veterans Administration and the healthcare it provides.  I was under the impression that VA hospitals were just about the worst place to receive medical care - historically, this was certainly the case.  But apparently, somewhere in the middle of the Clinton administration, a serious (and successful) effort at reform was made within the VA:

Instead, the VA was reinvented in every way possible. In the mid-1990s, Dr. Kenneth W. Kizer, then the VA's Health Under Secretary, installed the most extensive electronic medical-records system in the U.S. Kizer also decentralized decision-making, closed underused hospitals, reallocated resources, and most critically, instituted a culture of accountability and quality measurements. "Our whole motivation was to make the system work for the patient," says Kizer, now director of the National Quality Forum, a nonprofit dedicated to improving health care. "We did a top-to-bottom makeover with that goal always in mind."

In fact, the VA healthcare system is now in such good shape, VA hospitals and clinics are constantly rated "best in class" within the healthcare industry.  And, most interesting to me, the VA plan is being seen as a model for a national, single-payer healthcare system:

The biggest lesson? A nationwide health-care network that gets its funding from a single payer can institute mighty changes. Proponents of national health-care reform extrapolate even further. "The VA proves that you can get better results with an integrated, organized, national health-care system," says Dr. Lucian Leape, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and a leading expert on hospital safety. "We will not achieve even close to the level of quality and safety we need [in the U.S.] as long as we have individual practitioners and hospitals doing individual things."

Of course, Bush's War has already led to a huge increase in the number of veterans seeking treatment at VA hospitals.  How the system handles the influx over the next few years will be one of its biggests tests.

How good would a single-payer healthcare system be for the US economy and all Americans?  Better quality care, no massive healthcare costs to weigh down employers, and true accountability.
  ¶ 2:19 PM