[oooyay]

Yeah, I'm not buying it. My experience was bad and I've met many people who've had it worse there.

Again, it's the process and bureaucracy. The standard of care, when you get it, is mostly adequate but navigating their system is absolute hell. I suspect they're narrowly defining these studies to standard of care.

[sarchertech]

That could be the case. Here’s a meta study with links to all of the individual studies if you want to look deeper.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5215146/

But I know plenty of people who say the exact same thing about Kaiser. I know plenty of people who say the exact same thing about medical care in the US in general.

[oooyay]

Thanks for the link. They are only studying actual care provided. That's definitely going to fly right over the issues at the VA.

I've used Kaiser before and the system is nothing like the VA system. Are you a VA member or are you just trying to normalize it against something you know?

[sarchertech]

I'm not a VA member. I have close family who are though. And I hear the same kind of complaints from them as I do from family members with Kaiser.

Mostly around availability of specialists. Things like not being able to schedule an appointment with a Kaiser GI doctor for 6 months, but they wouldn't approve going to an outside doctor without going through some kind of byzantine appeals process.

As far as the studies go, I was originally posting them in response to the OP's claim that VA hospitals are "notorious horror shows", which implies things like botched surgeries.