Yeah… good move to add a bunch of pissed off veterans to the group of people already pissed off.
This is just a cash grab to private businesses that veterans don’t want.
I wonder how enlistment rates are fairing?
Privatize designed to make a big sucking sound as dollars go into execs pockets rather than to vets care. The private care I have received has been excellent but not a bit better than received via the VA. Supposedly will speed up care, not from my experience. My experience is much more costs, quality, timelyness not so much.
Last month, a ProPublica investigation of the private-care program that the administration is now expanding found overhead costs that were much higher than industry standards and comparable government programs.
No could hae foreseen this. No one.
@ljb860 Supposedly will speed up care, not from my experience.
The basic lie about privatization has been that veterans will get faster care in the private sector which is absurd when you factor in that vets will be going to the back of the line of existing civilians. it never made any sense to me and I don’t know why more vets can’t quite grasp that.
Koch Industries veterans want it.
A Division of United Health Care. Consumer Reports rated United Health Care as the worse Medicare program in So Cal.
When will the MSM announce ,every day and night that Trump/Putin are attempting to destroy veteran’s, Gold Star families,POW’s, government workers, intel agencies,our Constitution and the more then stupid Republican’s plus a free press?
I’d be ok if private companies did things if it was set up like I believe Germany does with their health care insurance. Supposedly they do it as not for profit with their incentive being they can pay higher salaries if they are efficient. Although I kind of wonder how efficient that is because you probably still have to have a government run audit and oversight to make sure things were going as the companies claim.
It was never 45* 's vision to privatize the VA.
Before he rode down that escalator, if he thought ‘VA’ he thought it was an STD. But his 3 chums have been fantasizing about this for years, along with 60% of the GOP.
My private health care? 2 months to get permission from the insurance company to even make an appt. with a specialist - the appts have been 3 to 5 months out every time. We certainly wouldn’t want to change such an excellent system.
Yeah…remember when we used to say the best care was the Veteran’s care? Oh yeah…go private…the GOP’s been screwing with that for the last 3 years and it’s fked now.
I wonder how they calculate that 30 minutes driving time.
In a nutshell, yes. This is a profit-driven policy.
The official notice for the new rules on the website for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs says the “Anticipated Costs and Benefits” are “TBD.”
In this case, “TBD” stands for Tremendous Bonus Day.
Question for TPMmods: can we set up a forum dedicated to the corporate theft-give away of our countries most vital government institutions, the privatization of the water supply (Wisconsin, etc.) and the telecommunications’ industry’s movement of our country’s phone services away from copper wire (a regulated utility) to digital cable (unregulated, not a utility)? I know that there are many more examples, but I am getting a little nauseated thinking about how we’ll never be able to undo this - to get it all back.
Just ask anyone from Chicago if they are better off now that all city meters are privately owned. It it a great racket: you don’t have to buy city streets but you can charge upwards of $6 an hour and I am not even sure how much parking ticket revenue goes to the city anymore…Boston just sold of our public garages for $$$ (Winthrop) and say that the something like $28m will go to renovating Boston Common which is just a big lawn, with some stuff on it.
I am just sick of this…as if we don’t know how bad this is going to get with the VA - once they become Partners Healthcare, the most vulnerable members of our communities will be drowning in medical debt. MAGA!
One of the articles reported that they’re using a Microsoft drive-time program. I once worked at a geodemographics company that used a similar program from another supplier. (Like many of its “innovations”, Microsoft invited a small firm to show them how the tech worked, as part of an audition for MS to buy the small firm, then instead ripped off their intellectual property and copied the tech for its own product.)
A drive-time program selects a blob on a map, based on assumptions that you’ll average (for example) 60 MPH on urban interstates, 40 MPH on secondary trunk roads, and 25 MPH on local streets counting time lost at stop signs and red lights. You specify the VA hospital’s location and specify a max drivetime, and it calculates a drivetime for each surrounding block based on how many miles of fast, medium, and slow roads are needed to get there from the hospital’s location. The resulting amoeba (of blocks with a drivetime under the specified maximum) stretches further in directions along main highways, and not as far in directions requiring slow streets.
The data set is then used to select households within the area and measure them, market to them, etc. For example, the VA’s 30-minute drivetime might be the hospital’s primary-care target market, and the 60-minute drivetime might be their specialty-care target market. For private hospitals, the target market might be everyone else in the region, so to participate in this program they might advertise to outlying households with veterans in the family.
For some purposes where transportation time is a big factor, drivetime can be a more effective selector than just picking by county, by city, or by ZIP code.
Stuff such as “the blood of patriots” which refresh “the tree of liberty”.
Thanks! I know that navigator-based drive times are accurate sometimes and a complete mess others…
Traditional programs used a simple algorithm based only on road types. As firms try to use Big Data to make results more personal and more instant, some (especially those tied into nav apps) adjust the calculation based on recent traffic-flow patterns (rush hour slower trunk routes than off-peak hours) or based on at-this-moment traffic data from systems like Waze or Uber. These may account for the occasions when you find big variations compared to how long the trip actually takes you.