People love to shit on the VA, because they’re the largest American healthcare provider in the country so there’s a lot of bad stories
But my last MRI went like this:
Doctor: you need an MRI, let me check if it’s open. (Less than a minute on laptop). Ok, go down to room ____ and they can get you in now.
There’s a huge up front cost for that machine, so for profit hospitals went everyone to use it to make the money back, and insurance wants no one to use it so they don’t have to pay.
Take insurance out of the picture, take the hospital trying to make money out of the picture. And it’s really that easy. No one pushes for unnecessary tests, no one tries to prevent necessary tests. And there’s a huge push towards preventive medicine, because it’s cheaper to catch shit early.
We already pay more than what it would cost, it’s just the healthcare industry donates to both parties, so as long as both standards are “at least they’re not the other team” shits never going to get fixed.
If we hold higher standards than that, it won’t take many election cycles to get change to actually happen