bestcareanywhere_cover.png

Best Care Anywhere:
Why VA Health Care Is Better Than Yours

By Phillip Longman
With a foreword by Timothy Noah

Published by PoliPointPress
189 Pages
Publication Date 3/07
ISBN: 978-0-9778253-0-1
$14.95, soft cover

  • Buy This Book:
  • borders_logo.png
  • barnesandnoble_logo.png
  • booksense_logo.png
  • powells_logo.png

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