Letters: VA making strides to improve state veterans home inspections

The Veterans Affairs Department deserves credit for two recent moves to improve the lives of veterans in its facilities and in state veterans homes.

First, the VA’s plan to gradually and safely reintroduce volunteers to its healthcare facilities is an important and timely step. Volunteers serve as some of the most critical eyes and ears in a facility. Many volunteers have established personal relationships with individuals they help care for, and thus serve as a vital link in the communication chain with the VA and other oversight agencies.

Second, I’m glad to see the VA is giving serious consideration to recent recommendations made by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which called on the VA to strengthen its oversight of inspections conducted in state veterans homes. The issue was the subject of a congressional hearing last month.

The GAO’s feedback was helpful, because the VA deserves the very best from its healthcare facility-inspection contractors. After all, the inspector should serve the VA, not the facility. The inspector should never identify a deficiency but then collaboratively allow the facility to fix the issue during the inspection. Without a rigorous inspection process that creates a paper trail of deficiencies, a facility could lapse back into negative practices in between site visits and never fully address underlying problems.

Leah Heimbach
President and owner
Healthcare Management Solutions

I was not surprised to read that job-based health insurance coverage is projected to cost more next year.

Private insurance companies have an overhead rate of 12% versus about 2% for Medicare, in large part due to marketing and other administrative expenses. The only way for them to compete is either through cherry-picking (via having fewer truly ill clients), withholding reimbursement for needed care, or through higher rates. None of these strategies are desirable from the consumer’s standpoint.

In the 1970s, the percentage of America’s gross domestic product consumed by healthcare expenditures was 8%. It’s more than doubled to 18%. A major reason for the difference in costs is our emphasis on private insurance companies.

And let’s not forget that as Americans lost their jobs during the pandemic, in many cases they also lost their health insurance.

What’s the obvious remedy? We must have Medicare for All. Single-payer works in Canada, for example, and it can work just as well here (as it does in so many other developed countries). All Canadians are covered and per capita costs ($4,826) are a fraction of what we pay ($10, 209).

Single-payer is the ultimate solution, but is opposed by the massive and influential healthcare industrial complex for obvious self-interested reasons. And they spread their money around in both parties, influencing policy for their own benefit.

As voters, we will once again have the power to enact change in a few short months via who we send to Washington.

Jack Bernard
Peachtree City, Ga.