I'm curious how those surveys are administered. If they're not surveying patients that walk away or don't get treatment then they aren't really capturing the full picture. Unlike private hospitals the VA is obligated to serve all veterans and it's the portion that they miss or manage out that became problematic national news. There's a reason Obama passed legislation allowing veterans to seek outside care and it wasn't always wait times. It also had to do with VA guidelines, standards, and practices which very much differ from private care.

It’s possible that all kinds of things skew the results. It’s possible that veterans are more likely to report that they are satisfied in general.

But there have been numerous studies comparing the VA to private hospitals that show the VA tends to be safer and more effective as well as having higher satisfaction scores.

>There’s a reason Obama passed legislation…

People are constantly complaining about other health systems like Kaiser and private insurance companies as well. The VA is the countries largest health network and veterans are a very symptomatic group.

My guess is that if you changed history so that Kaiser was in charge of veterans healthcare, with the same guidelines and standard of care they use today, you’d have seen a similar law passed.

Yeah, I'm not buying it. My experience was bad and I've met many people who've had it worse there.

Again, it's the process and bureaucracy. The standard of care, when you get it, is mostly adequate but navigating their system is absolute hell. I suspect they're narrowly defining these studies to standard of care.

That could be the case. Here’s a meta study with links to all of the individual studies if you want to look deeper.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5215146/

But I know plenty of people who say the exact same thing about Kaiser. I know plenty of people who say the exact same thing about medical care in the US in general.

Thanks for the link. They are only studying actual care provided. That's definitely going to fly right over the issues at the VA.

I've used Kaiser before and the system is nothing like the VA system. Are you a VA member or are you just trying to normalize it against something you know?

I'm not a VA member. I have close family who are though. And I hear the same kind of complaints from them as I do from family members with Kaiser.

Mostly around availability of specialists. Things like not being able to schedule an appointment with a Kaiser GI doctor for 6 months, but they wouldn't approve going to an outside doctor without going through some kind of byzantine appeals process.

As far as the studies go, I was originally posting them in response to the OP's claim that VA hospitals are "notorious horror shows", which implies things like botched surgeries.