In the 19 years that I have practiced family medicine, few things have been as disheartening as seeing our nation’s honorable veterans so frequently denied the healthcare they earned with their service. Too often, these heroes are treated with anything but care.
At my practice in the Delaware Valley area, I often see veterans who have been let down by the Department of Veterans Affairs. One veteran in particular stands out in my mind. He is an affable, hardworking 71-year-old male who is a veteran of the Vietnam War. He returned with severe post-traumatic stress disorder and multiple other issues in his 20s. His medical conditions grew worse and worse over his lifetime, as his PTSD was not diagnosed by the VA until age 69.
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Sadly, the VA has done little to take care of him. He has fought the VA tooth and nail to even recognize his conditions. It took years, for instance, just to get a partial disability rating, despite his decades of psychological counseling for severe PTSD.
It is no wonder that he revealed during an office visit with me that veterans share the impression that the VA’s true motto is, “Delay, deny, wait ’til they die.”
Alas, his story is far from unique or over. Hundreds of thousands of veterans can attest to it. In the wake of the Phoenix scandal 2 1/2 years ago, it was discovered that as many as 300,000 veterans may have died while waiting for the agency’s help. This should have shocked the agency into action; instead, the status quo still reigns.
Today, more than 77,000 veterans have been waiting more than 125 days for the VA to make a decision about whether they qualify for care. There’s also a good chance they wouldn’t receive timely care even if they made it through that process. Across America, over 500,000 veterans have been waiting more than 30 days to see a VA doctor. Over 35,000 have been waiting more than 120 days — three months.
Philadelphia’s VA system is far from immune. Roughly 2,500 veterans in the area have waited more than 30 days for care. As of earlier this summer, the wait lists were actually longer than they were last year, after Congress had given the VA an extra $10 billion, proving once and for all that money can’t solve this problem.
Solving this crisis is something that greatly concerns me. Although I am not a VA-employed doctor, I still see many veterans who receive Tricare, which is essentially military health insurance. This allows those veterans to receive care wherever they want, whether it’s at the VA or from a private physician like me.
In my experience, Tricare is beloved by both veterans and their families who receive it.
I believe this points to a solution: Why not enroll every veteran in Tricare, no exceptions?
Here’s how this plan would work. Every veteran would have major medical insurance that they could use at their discretion. This would instantly cut the need for the costly, bloated, inaccessible, and red-tape-ridden VA facilities that many veterans have come to despise and fear. This has the potential to dramatically improve veterans’ care. Any veteran could find the physician or facility that best serves their unique needs, rather than being forced onto wait lists at their nearest VA facility.
I have been heartened in recent months to see Donald Trump move towards exactly this solution, which was previously touted by Dr. Ben Carson. Both Trump and his advisers have given strong indications that they see Tricare as the model for veterans healthcare. I can’t say the same thing about Hillary Clinton. Last year, she downplayed the wait-list scandal, even though it cost veterans their lives. Now she’s criticizing VA reformers for wanting to “privatize” the agency.
But that’s not what anyone’s talking about. Whether it’s Donald Trump, me, or the hundreds of thousands of veterans left behind by the VA, we simply want America’s heroes to be able to make the choice that’s best for them, not have their healthcare mandated by bureaucrats. Didn’t they earn that with their service?
Dr. Wax is a family physician practicing in Mullica Hill, New Jersey. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
