Kenneth Kizer

See the following -

Clueless or Craven? The White House Gets the VA Story Exactly Backwards

Sad to say, the Obama administration seems clueless about what might be broken at the VA and how to fix it. Either that, or it is just cravenly saying and doing whatever it thinks is necessary to make the story go away. Evidence for the clueless hypothesis came on Friday, when White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rob Nabors weighed in with his diagnosis (pdf) of what ails the VA. The document is extraordinary in its contradictions, sloppy formulations, and non-evidence-based conclusions.

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Fixing The Veteran's Healthcare Mess

Carolyn McClanahan | Forbes.com | June 4, 2014

What went wrong with our Veteran’s health care system? It comes down to two main culprits – first, the system was asked to do too much, and second, incentives put in place to make the system perform better backfired. In this post, I address the stresses in the Veterans Health Administration, how the incentives backfired, and ways to help get the VA health care system back on track...

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Former VA Official: Obamacare Puts Vets At Risk

Bryant Jordan | Military.com | May 3, 2013

The Affordable Care Act -- generally known as “Obamacare” -- could lead to increased health complications, emergency room visits and even shorter life spans for some veterans, according to a former under secretary of Health for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Read More »

Lawmakers Wonder If VA Underestimates Impact Of Health Care Reform

Rick Maze | Army Times | April 23, 2013

A House committee is concerned that the Veterans Affairs Department may be underestimating the cost and burden of national health care reform for veterans’ hospitals and clinics. Read More »

Phillip Longman's Senate Testimony Before the The State of VA Health Care Hearings

Phillip Longman | U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs | May 14, 2014

We need to open up the VA and grow it, extending no-questions-asked eligibility not only to all vets but to their family members as well. This not only makes clinical sense, it also makes economic sense. So long as the VA remains one of, if not the most, cost- effective, scientifically driven, integrated health care delivery systems in the country, the more patients it treats, the better for everyone.

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VA's $400K History Book Sidetracked By Crisis

Dennis Wagner | AZ Central | January 19, 2015

When the media, investigators and Congress exposed the Department of Veterans Affairs' broken and dishonest health-care system last year, VA officials were forced to postpone publication of a $400,000-plus history book that glowingly portrays the agency's achievements...

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Who Should Head the VA?

...last Saturday, Cosgrove suddenly withdrew his name from consideration, stating that he still had work that needed doing at the Cleveland Clinic. What might that work be? Just hours before Cosgrove made his announcement, the intrepid trade magazine Modern Healthcare published a little noticed article that revealed a long pattern of safety problems at the Cleveland Clinic—problems that were so serious that the federal government repeatedly threatened to shut off the $1 billion a year the clinic collects from Medicare.

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