Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care Is Better Than Yours [Paperback]

Phillip Longman tells the amazing story of the turnaround of the Department of Veterans Affairs health-care system from a dysfunctional, scandal-prone bureaucracy into the benchmark for high-quality medicine in the United States.Best Care Anywhereshows that vast swaths of what we think we know about health, health care, and medical economics are just plain wrong. And the book demonstrates how this extraordinarily cost-effective model, which has proven to be highly popular with veterans, can be made available to everyone. New to this edition is an analysis of how the shortcomings of both so-called Obamacare and Republican plans to privatize Medicare reinforce the need for applying the lessons of the VA. Also included are completely updated statistics and research, as well as examples of how the private sector is already beginning to learn from the VA’s example.Preface to the Third Edition: After Obamacare
Introduction
Chapter ONE: Best Care Anywhere
Chapter TWO: Hitting Bottom
Chapter THREE: Revenge of the Hard Hats
Chapter FOUR: VistA in Action
Chapter FIVE: The Kizer Revolution
Chapter SIX: Safety First
Chapter SEVEN: Who Cares about Quality?
Chapter EIGHT: When Less Is More
Chapter NINE: Open-Source Medicine
Chapter TEN: Growing the VA
Chapter ELEVEN: VA Care for Everyone
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author“This important book describes the turnaround of the VA health-care system—now widely recognized as leading the nation in terms of both quality and costs—and offers insights that will be useful to patients and policymakers alike.”
—Elliot S. Fisher, MD, Professor of Medicine and Professor of Community and Family Medicine, Dartmouth Medical School

“The improvement of the VA health-care system in the past decade is one of the most impressive stories of large-scale change—and the leadership thereof—in modern times. Students of qualil32