Examining Veterans’ Health Care

Between 1994 and 1999, Kenneth W. Kizer, MD, MPH, led a dramatic turnaround of the Veterans health care system. Today, in study after study, the VA emerges as an exemplar of best practices in patient safety, disease management, evidence-based medicine, electronic medical records and customer service. Both Senators Clinton and Obama, as well as a number of jounalists and academics, have recently pointed to the VA health care system as a model for national healthcare reform, and a December 2007 Congressional Budget Office interim report suggests VA may offer lessons to other public sector, as well as private sector systems.

But there is a very real danger that the system could unravel due to a confluence of political and financial pressures in the not-distant future. With the enormous federal financial challenges predicted by GAO and CBO for the next decade, what is really needed to treat the hundreds of thousands of new wounded warriors coming to VA hospitals out of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the millions of Vietnam, World War II and other veterans who currently rely on VA healthcare?

The New America Foundation invites you to join a panel of policy experts as they participate in a thoughtful discussion of the health care needs of today’s veterans, and discuss concepts from an independent commission focused on bringing about major change in VA’s health care for the future. As questions of cost effectiveness and quality care play out for the next decade, these experts will inform the debate in the public sphere and policy arena.

Participants

• Kenneth W. Kizer, MD, MPH
  Former Under Secretary for Health, Department of Veterans Affairs
  Commissioner, Commission on the Future for America’s Veterans

• William Diefenderfer, III
  Former Deputy Director, Office of Management and Budget
  Commissioner, Commission on the Future for America’s Veterans

• Allison Percy, PhD
  Senior Policy Analyst
  Congressional Budget Office

• Arthur Hamerschlag
  Logistics Management Institute

• Cathy Wiblemo
  Staff Director
  House Veterans Affairs Health Subcommittee

• Philip Longman (moderator)
  Research Director, Next Social Contract Initiative and Schwartz Senior Fellow, New America Foundation
  Author, Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care is Better than Yours