{"id":3114,"date":"2018-04-26T17:34:28","date_gmt":"2018-04-26T22:34:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lisa.rushworth.us\/?p=3114"},"modified":"2018-04-26T17:34:28","modified_gmt":"2018-04-26T22:34:28","slug":"reality-check-the-va","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/?p=3114","title":{"rendered":"Reality Check &#8211; The VA"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Alternative Fact:\u00a0\u201cWe can talk about experience but the VA, when you think about 13 million people, you could take the head of the biggest hospital corporation of the world and it&#8217;s peanuts compared to the VA. So nobody has experience\u201d &#8212; Trump on Fox &amp; Friends this morning.<\/p>\n<p>Real Fact: The VA does not have thirteen million employees, they&#8217;ve just just under 400k. By their own documentation, they have <a href=\"https:\/\/www.va.gov\/health\/aboutVHA.asp\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">nine million enrolled veterans<\/a>. Unless this number does not include dependents who *quality* to receive services *and* there are an additional four million qualified dependents &#8230; thirteen million is another Trump-ed number. Even if they&#8217;ve got thirteen million people enrolled in their health plan, the number of patient *visits* (i.e. one guy comes in every week, that&#8217;s fifty patient visits a year), a standard metric within the health care industry, is more useful (and, honestly, impressive sounding). They had 95 million outpatient visits and 700k inpatient admissions in 2015.<\/p>\n<p>Now that&#8217;s a lot of employees , but Amazon has more. Amazon also has something like 300 million active customers. So it&#8217;s not like anyone anywhere is this size. But OK, he&#8217;s limiting it to hospital corporations.<\/p>\n<p>Hospital Corporation of America has like 200 thousand employees and handles <a href=\"https:\/\/hcahealthcare.com\/about\/hca-at-a-glance.dot\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">twenty seven million<\/a>\u00a0patient visits a year. Less, sure, but how many employees and patient visits does the White House doctor handle? It&#8217;s not like Trump went with the Cleveland Clinic guy who oversees <a href=\"https:\/\/my.clevelandclinic.org\/about\/overview\/who-we-are\/facts-figures\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fifty thousand employees and seven million patient visits<\/a> and defends the choice saying anyone&#8217;s experience is going to need to scale when joining the VA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Alternative Fact:\u00a0\u201cWe can talk about experience but the VA, when you think about 13 million people, you could take the head of the biggest hospital corporation of the world and it&#8217;s peanuts compared to the VA. So nobody has experience\u201d &#8212; Trump on Fox &amp; Friends this morning. Real Fact: The VA does not have &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[84],"class_list":["post-3114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-alternativefact"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3114"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3115,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3114\/revisions\/3115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}