For a brief time I was in an HMO, and it sucked....so I signed up for a more expensive plan. OTOH, the HMO is a lot like the VA health care system, where a few of my friends were a long time getting properly diagnosed, BUT once the octors knew what it was, and that it was serious, they pulled all the stops. One friend in particular went thru some hard months before they found and fixed his problem, an infection in his foot that was poisoning his body.
But another friend had many major illnesss well treated for open heart surgery, renal artery surgery, aortic artery surgery, and cancer where he had chemo, radiation, etc. He was a survivor of the first order, all on VA health care, until the last disease, Pancreatic Cancer. That is a death sentence, but even so, he lasted another year after the diagnosis. He was a tough old bird...and the VA took care of him.
I have access to VA health care, but use it sparingly. It is convenient for my annual physicals and lab tests, but for my Parkinson's I will stick with a civilian nuerologist, likewise any other potentially serious illnes. The VA is short on in-house specialists....
Yes, they are. Because specialists cost money, and government doesn't have endless cash to fund gov-care.
I wonder if your friend would still be alive if he had gone to some place better.
I will say that one of the issues with government funded anything, is that if you go to a difference place, you can get better or worse care. This because of differences in cost of living.
If you have $100,000 to treat a patient in New York, that is far less than $100,000 for treating a patient in Utah. Sometimes government facilities in low cost of living areas, do very well.
But for every good, or at least acceptable story from a VA hospital, I've heard at least twice as many horror stories. One particularly bad story was a doctor that had worked at three different private hospitals, and was kicked out of each one for killing patients and botched surgeries. He finally couldn't get a job in the private pay-for-service hospitals (if for no other reason than that evil profit motive. It turns out dead patients don't pay bills, and that leads to a lack of profit).
So he went to a hospital that had no profit motive, a VA government hospital. They snapped him up, and he slaughtered (if I remember right) about 7 patients before a nurse contacted the wife of a dead veteran and told her to get a lawyer. If that nurse hadn't tipped off this widow, who knows how many more patients he would have killed before government bureaucrats would have gotten around to checking the doctors record.
But then, to me, a capitalist, this is what I would expect. If you are not a valued customer... if the hospital gets paid no matter what they do... then you are not a customer anymore. You're a problem. This is why Americans that move to Canada are always shocked by how rude and indifferent staff at gov-care facilities in Canada are. It's because if you don't like it... tough... you can't do jack. It's not like you can deny them money by going to a rival hospital. There is no loss to their pay check if you are unhappy. And the rival hospital is just as indifferent, because it's not a rival. Both get paid whether you are cared for and healed, or if you die. Makes not the slightest difference to them.
Brian Sinclair, a double amputee, died during a 34-hour wait in the ER of the Health Sciences Centre in 2008 from a treatable bladder infection.
Winnipeg court says man who died in ER has no case for its lawsuit - Winnipeg Free Press
How much money did the hospital lose? Zero. And the lawsuit was tossed out. You think the government is going to let this slide? Yeah, actually they will. Because this is government hospital, and they care.
