6/24/2014: The VA problems date back to at least 1958 when I was a junior medical student on a medicine service at Dearborn, Michigan VA hospital. At that time physicians were in my opinion incompetent and I let them know my opinion. Standard operating procedure was to keep patients in hospital until there was a new occupant in order to keep money flowing for full occupancy. I called the staff doctors out on this practice as wrong.
I flunked my clinical service at the VA. The chief of medicine called me in. He said you have the highest grades on all the testing and you work at the university hospital, but the lowest grade from the VA clinical experience. I told him that I called the doctors out on the above issues. He said he knew it was like that, but I should have just shut up. Not my nature at the time. He gave me a “B” as his averaging A and F.
Still terrible at the VA. Warning: This is government medicine and single payer medicine at its best, a.k.a. Obamacare.
