8 years ago
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307,000 veterans died awaiting Veterans Affairs health care, report finds
Hundreds of thousands of veterans listed in the Department of Veterans Affairs enrollment system died before their applications for care were processed, according to a report issued Wednesday. The VA’s inspector general found that out of about 800,000 records stalled in the agency’s system for managing health care enrollment, there were more than 307,000 records that belonged to veterans who had died months or years in the past.
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This is a very interesting case to solve. Mismanagement, not following procedures, lack of procedures, there is a lot to be fixed. If I remember correctly they had the same problem in Belgium some years ago, not with health care, but with Belgian Federal Service of Social Security. In some cases applications took so long to process that people died before they got anything back. Working in a knowledge based economy lead to the conclusion that it can’t be checked whether people are working or not. You can only check if they meet their objectives. Micro-management was not the solution. So they gave the employees more freedom instead to work whenever and where ever they wanted, as long as they met their objectives. That actually helped.
The wife works for medical billing for a large hospital. She comes home all the time with stories of how employees are micromanaged, how they're required to attend endless stupid training courses 'how to get along with your co-workers', and how anal they are about PTO, clocking in and out, and dozens of other irritating things that would drive me batty inside of a week. The effect? The employees all act utterly childish. Backstabbing is common. Running to the manager for the slightest thing is pretty much de rigueur. HR is probably the busiest department out of the whole company with the amount of shit that goes on.
If you treat adults like children, they'll act like it. If you treat them like adults and give them reasonable goals, then they will surprise you with the results.
Absolutely!
I think the problem arises when you have the competing goals of quality assurance and availability. On one hand, the government wants to ensure that healthcare is high quality('cause you know, people can die), and so regulate it very strictly. But on the other, the government wants many people to be able to enjoy it, and the efficiency of the healthcare system, currently hampered by the regulation, is not allowing it to do so.
The government has to realize that while the regulations may be ensuring quality, on a practical level they have to be loosened so that healthcare can achieve both its goals.
How sad to see this happen. There's a lot to be fixed, and as other commentators have pointed out, it's not easy to unwrangle.