WHEN: Saturday, July 19, 2014 @ 3PM
WHERE: 518 Valencia (one block west of 16th St BART and ½ block south of 16th St )
SPEAKER: Suzanne Gordon, award-winning journalist and author. She has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic Monthly, the American Prospect, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, JAMA, The Annals of Internal Medicine, and others. She is the co-editor of the Culture and Politics of Healthcare Work series at Cornell University Press.
For more info., call: (415) 695-7891 or Email Don.
This venue is wheelchair accessible.
Download leaflet here: 2014 July 19 Veterans
First it was Social Security, then Medicare and Medicaid, and then the public health care option under Obamacare. Now, in the wake of recent allegations that veterans hospitals put patients on secret wait lists, Republicans are calling for the privatization of the Veterans Health Administration, the nation’s largest public health care system which provides cost-effective and high quality care to 6.2 million veterans.
It is of course unacceptable if patients suffered as a result of any delays. But regardless of what went wrong at any VA facility, turning veterans over to private sector insurers and for-profit hospitals is not the solution.
With its salaried staff of nearly 280,000, the VA has long been a model for health care delivery. The VA’s 152 hospitals, 900 clinics, 300 mental health centers, and other facilities — many located in rural areas that the private sector ignores — care for more than 230,000 people a day. In a recent survey of veterans for the American Customer Satisfaction Index, patients rated the system’s services as equal to or better than private sector health care facilities.