Phil Longman delivers a shocking message about America’s health care system. Despite its expense, our system fails to provide appropriate, evidence-based medicine for half the patients it treats. A proven solution has arrived: the long-maligned, reinvented Veterans Health Administration, which is now the highest quality provider in the United States.

Best Care Anywhere uses the VHA turnaround to illustrate deeper lessons for the U.S. health care system as a whole. The book concludes with a realistic “battle plan” to apply the lessons of the VHA turnaround to America’s massive health care sector, which now accounts for 14 percent of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product but lags other nations in health outcomes and effectiveness.

Phillip Longman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of numerous articles and books on health care, demographics, and public policy. His most recent book, The Empty Cradle, was published by Basic Books in March 2004. The book examines how the rapid yet uneven fall in birth rates around the globe is affecting the evolution of culture and politics.

Mr. Longman is also the author of Born to Pay: The New Politics of Aging in America (1987) and The Return of Thrift: How the Collapse of the Middle Class Welfare State Will Reawaken Values in America (1996). Mr. Longman’s work has appeared in such publications as the Atlantic, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Harvard Business Review, the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Monthly, Washington Post, and the Wilson Quarterly.

He is a frequent public speaker, including addresses to the National War College, the Department of Health and Human Services, PopTech, and Fortune magazine’s annual “Brainstorm” conference. He is also frequently interviewed by both foreign and domestic media, including National Public Radio, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Der Spiegel, and many others. Formerly a senior writer and deputy assistant managing editor at U.S. News & World Report, he has won numerous awards for his business and financial writing, including UCLA’s Gerald Loeb Award, and the top prize for investigative journalism from Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Health Affairs, Review by Theodore R. Mannor (PDF)

Review on CBS News

The Best Care Anywhere
By Phillip Longman
Washington Monthly – January 2005
Ten years ago, veterans hospitals were dangerous, dirty, and scandal-ridden. Today, they’re producing the highest quality care in the country. Their turnaround points the way toward solving America’s health-care crisis.

Quick. When you read “veterans hospital,” what comes to mind? Maybe you recall the headlines from a dozen years ago about the three decomposed bodies found near a veterans medical center in Salem, Va. Two turned out to be the remains of patients who had wandered months before. The other body had been resting in place for more than 15 years. The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) admitted that its search for the missing patients had been “cursory.”

Or maybe you recall images from movies like Born on the Fourth of July, in which Tom Cruise plays a wounded Vietnam vet who becomes radicalized by his shabby treatment in a crumbling, rat-infested veterans hospital in the Bronx. Sample dialogue: “This place is a fuckin’ slum!”

By the mid-1990s, the reputation of veterans hospitals had sunk so low that conservatives routinely used their example as a kind of reductio ad absurdum critique of any move toward “socialized medicine.” Here, for instance, is Jarret B. Wollstein, a right-wing activist/author, railing against the Clinton health-care plan in 1994: “To see the future of health care in America for you and your children under Clinton’s plan,” Wollstein warned, “just visit any Veterans Administration hospital. You’ll find filthy conditions, shortages of everything, and treatment bordering on barbarism.”…Read More

August 2007

While much attention is being paid to recent revelations about substandard care at the
Walter Reed Army Medical Center, it is critically important that this issue not detract
from the superlative achievements of the nation’s VA Hospitals.

**Walter Reed Army Hospital is NOT part of the U.S. Veterans Administration**

In his new book, BEST CARE ANYWHERE: Why VA Healthcare is Better Than
Yours (PoliPointPress, $14.95, April 2007, ISBN: 0-9778253-0-2), Phillip Longman,
author and senior fellow at the New America Foundation, tells the compelling story of
how the Veterans Administration (VA) system of hospitals went from dangerous, dirty
and scandal-ridden to offering what is demonstrably the highest quality care in America.

Longman’s research and conclusions stem neither from ideology nor politics. When his
wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he was forced to confront the inefficiencies,
inadequacies and uncertainties that are an all too familiar part of health care in the
world’s richest country. Thus, when he was assigned by Fortune Magazine to figure out
who had the best solution for America’s health care crisis, he eagerly accepted. Fortune
declined to publish the results of his research.

Longman’s story of how and why VA became the benchmark for quality medicine in the
United States promises to shift the terms of the debate about health policy in America. He
argues that precisely because the VA is a big government bureaucracy with a near
lifetime relationship with its patients, it has incentives for investing in prevention, disease
management, electronic patient records, and other quality measures that are lacking in
for-profit medicine.

Phillip Longman, a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, is the
author of numerous articles and books on demographics, economics, and social change.
His work has appeared in such publications as The Atlantic Monthly, The Financial
Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Harvard Business Review, The New Republic,
The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Washington Monthly. His
most recent book, The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity
And What to Do About It, was published by Basic Books in 2004.

Phillip Longman has uncovered the biggest, untold medical story of the last decade; the highest
quality, lowest cost health care in America is being produced not by the private sector, but by a
government agency, the VA. It’s a story that will fundamentally alter the biggest medical issue of
the coming decade: the drive for universal health care.
–Paul Glastris, Editor-in-Chief, The Washington Monthly