Good point ^. Is this same problem, not enough primary care physicians, the reason why there's such a backlog over at the VA hospitals? The way I see, the govt will nationalize medical care anyway. I just didn't realize Medicare was already the pivotal key.
The VA hospital issue is actually a LOT more complicated than lack of primary care physicians. It resulted from a perfect storm of a lot of minor issues all happening at the same time and turning into a massive hurricane of crap.
First, The VA decided in 2008 that the old paper-only way of filing benefits claims was old, out of date, and really slow. So they made a plan to put the whole process on the computer so it could be done digitally. This in itself is a pretty awesome idea.
Second, In 2013, the VA decided to make some massive changes in the way that some claims worked. They made it a lot easier to receive benefits for Leukemia, Parkinson’s Disease, Heart Disease, Agent Orange Exposure, and (heres the bigggg one) PTSD. As you would expect this meant that the VA all the sudden got about 60 bajillion new claims flooding it.
Now lets go back to the digitization. 2013 was the year that the Paper system ended and the Digital Claims system went live. Whenever you bring out new software, almost by definition, no one knows what the hell they're doing. So the VA was getting twice as many claim requests at the same time that their process for handling claims completely changed. This is what caused the massive backlog. In other words, this isn't a Doctor problem, its a Paperwork problem.
.......Then it turns out a bunch of the higher ups in the VA hospitals decided they didn't want to look bad, so they pressured doctors to alter their patient records to make the backlog look better. Earlier this year, a whistleblower leaked that all this was going on, and the rest is history. Messed up, messed up, history.
