Every day in America, 20 veterans are committing suicide.

You can blame the VA all you want, until you realize, that this country is incredibly short psychiatrists. And, no, it’s not because we’re less crazy than the rest of the world.

Psychiatry has gotten short shift by our “free-market, capitalist health care for profit system” – the one where insurance companies decide on what to pay and what not to.

Psychiatrists make less than almost any other specialty. We have a health care system that often treats dental, vision, hearing and psychological as somehow not quite fully medical insurances problem. Really. As if you can’t eat because of bad teeth- the rest of you will be ok?

The Dayton VA is trying to hire 3 psychiatrists right now. They can’t find them.

My formerly homeless veteran needs an appointment- they can’t comply in a timely manner, so he was approved for “Choice care”- the ability to go to a private doctor on their list of providers. The problem, the list is really short, and if you look up the reputation of a few of the providers I wouldn’t send my worst enemy to them.

The problem is that to be able to be a “Choice care” provider, you have to have your computers talk to the VA computers, and apparently, not everyone wants to do that. So, his appointment is made- in September!

There is a NYTimes article today about the stupid political answer- which is to abolish the only good health care system in America, and replace it with the market driven one as a solution. That’s not going to solve the problem. Vets have special issues, and the VA system is built to deal with them.

Two years after a Department of Veterans Affairs scandal involving long wait times at veterans hospitals, an official report has found that the veterans’ health care system suffers from “profound deficiencies” despite billions of dollars spent in recent years to overhaul it. The report says that the hospital system needs sweeping changes, including a program that would pay for all veterans to see private doctors.

In a document nearly 300 pages long released late on Tuesday, the 15-member Commission on Care, created by Congress after the scandal, contained a list of recommendations to improve the nation’s largest public health care system.

“Although care delivered by V.A. is in many ways comparable or better in clinical quality to that generally available in the private sector,” the report concluded, “it is inconsistent from facility to facility, and can be substantially compromised by problems with access, service, and poorly functioning operational systems and processes.”

Source: Care by Private Doctors Among Big Changes Urged for V.A. Health System – The New York Times

Here is the simple answer for the immediate problem: allow private psychiatrists a way to file reports with the VA system via a translation portal- ie. get their output from their current systems and build a port program. And, start denying them access to medicaid and medicare patients if they don’t join the choice care program. You want government money, you have to be willing to take on veterans.

Secondly, for psychiatrists that work for hospitals- that currently get money from the feds- also require them to accept choice care patients.

We can’t afford to lose any more veterans, just because a computer program isn’t compatible, or there is more money not working for the government.