OKC VA as primary insurance

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John6185

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They can use local providers.
The VA provides care depending on your financial situation and/or if it's service connected. You can't get VA care if you don't meet either of those guidelines even if a vet if I remember right.
The Doctor lost his license to practice and was destitute plus he was a 100 percenter.
 

TerryMiller

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They can use local providers.
The VA provides care depending on your financial situation and/or if it's service connected. You can't get VA care if you don't meet either of those guidelines even if a vet if I remember right.

I tried to get "signed up" with VA when I was in Oregon. I didn't need nor want medical assistance. I just wanted to get "signed up" with VA. They rejected me because the wife and I made too much money (combined) to qualify. I don't mind because I know there are a lot of vets that are far worse off financially than I am.

Wife was ticked off because VA wanted our incomes combined. She felt that qualification should depend on simply the veteran's income.
 

tRidiot

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I tried to get "signed up" with VA when I was in Oregon. I didn't need nor want medical assistance. I just wanted to get "signed up" with VA. They rejected me because the wife and I made too much money (combined) to qualify. I don't mind because I know there are a lot of vets that are far worse off financially than I am.

Wife was ticked off because VA wanted our incomes combined. She felt that qualification should depend on simply the veteran's income.

Yeah, people think you can get 'free health care' for life if you serve in the military. Not so, and even though I'm not in a VA facility, I deal with veterans on a daily basis and the care they get through the VA infuriates me.

Sadly, Medicare is about the best insurance there is out there these days, as far as getting things done. All commercial insurances now seem to have sky high deductibles, and require insane amounts of prior authorizations and consultations for anyone to get anything.

VA requires all referrals and prescriptions go through them, they require that WE, as PROVIDERS must reapply for authorization (permission) to see their patients individually every year, they require patients (some anyways, don't ask me how they decide) to come see them and have labs done through them once yearly in spite of the fact they provide substandard care, or they will not cover them.

I swear to God, every freaking day I think about refusing to take new VA patients. It's such a PITA.

<edit> I don't even have time to sit here and type out the list of incredible frustrations I have with the VA system.
 

SMS

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They can use local providers.
The VA provides care depending on your financial situation and/or if it's service connected. You can't get VA care if you don't meet either of those guidelines even if a vet if I remember right.

That's the public perception, but in fact there are multiple priority groups, and you can get care in the lower groups even if you don't have a rated service connected condition or financial hardship. There are some blanket qualifications such as service in Vietnam between '62 and '75 or the Persian Gulf between '90 and '98, vets within 5 years of discharge, and interestingly anyone who served at least 30 days active duty at Camp Lejeune between '53 and '87 (Group 6).

In 2017, the VA treated something like 3.2 million vets in the 3 main service connected groups, 1 through 3.

They also treated almost 2.75 million in the remaining groups, 4 through 8 (very rough numbers)....including over 800,000 patients in group 8C which is specifically for those who "don't have a service-connected condition" and over 250,000 non-veteran patients.

Like tRidiot mentions, the red tape and bureaucracy has become so entrenched that I think the organization needs to be restructured into providing care exclusively for groups 1 through 3 and outsourcing the rest to competent private care.
 
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Aries

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@tRidiot I qualify for medicare in 3 years, but my concern is that it seems like so many doctors will not accept medicare patients. Am I correct in assuming my current doctors will probably continue with me, but am I likely to have trouble if I need a new doctor? I live in the Tulsa area, if that makes a difference.
 

tRidiot

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Eh, there are a number that don't accept Medicare, too, yes. Once doctors get 'filled up' with more private insurance patients, they will often stop taking Medicare because it is a hassle to deal with them, Medicare reimbursement sucks, and they typically have more medical problems and are more complicated patients - i.e., you spend more time and get paid less. So yes, Medicare patients are in general not the best choice for one's practice. We see a SIGNIFICANT difference in our practice between some providers (such as myself) who have a ton of Medicare patients and several others who have been around a LOT longer and now see much more private insurance patients than Medicare - it makes a YUUUUUUGE difference in those practioners' bottom line, as well as being able to see MANY more patients in a day, because they don't have to spend 30-45 minutes trying to sort through medication lists, those lists being altered by multiple other specialists/providers, as well as people who don't even KNOW what they take, don't bring their meds with them, or bring a list that isn't up to date or accurate and we spend 3 times as long just trying to sort out what they're taking now, plus looking through documentation of tests being done, seeing if reports from other providers/specialists have been sent, trying to interpret a patient's perception of what other doctors told them, etc.

Compare this to a younger patient like a child coming in for a Well Child exam or someone in their 30s or 40s with just a couple of meds who are generally more on top of their medical stuff, and the time spent with Medicare (and V.A.!) patients is EXTRAORDINARILY longer than others, and really means you can only see about half as many patients - and couple that with the fact Medicare pays less for those patients.

You can see why so many of my colleagues want nothing to do with Medicare.
 

cktad

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Don’t ChampVA dependents use the VA or are they “farmed out” on the local economy? I had a Doctor friend that passed away and his wife is on ChampVA.
My wife went on ChampVA last year. I did some research and there are some (very few) VA facilities that will see dependents on CahmpVA. My wife has Medicare A/B and Global Health as a supplement. ChampVA is considered an additional insurance and pays after the others do. For instance she has a $25 specialist copay and copays for RXs and tests like MRIs etc. and ChampVA pays all those deductibles. It has saved us a lot of money.
 

dennishoddy

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Like tRidiot mentions, the red tape and bureaucracy has become so entrenched that I think the organization needs to be restructured into providing care exclusively for groups 1 through 3 and outsourcing the rest to competent private care.

There are issues with outsourcing. It's going to have to be better than it is now.
Obama started the choice program for vets that live more than 40 miles from a VA provider or hospital. It became an abject failure because of the mountains of paperwork required for the civilian provider to be compensated for their services, and payment was so difficult to get that they just wrote it off or never collected. Every minute detail had to be pre-approved. If not the Veteran had to pay from their pocket. Payments were so difficult that providers were turning them over to collection agencies.
President Trump streamlined the program making it much easier to use, but it's still junk IMHO.
I'm priority 1 Service Connected and live 100 miles from the nearest VA hospital. I get travel pay, so a day trip to OKC isn't that big of a deal.
My provider has a procedure that he wants to run that would require me to be in the OKC VA at 0700 start the procedure and be complete at 1600 hrs. Asked if I could use the Choice program at our local hospital. They said sure, those Choice folks would get a referral from the VA and would contact me directly. Three weeks went by before the Choice program people called, and said that wasn't available at our local hospital. The closest would be OKC or Tulsa. Since we have relatives in the Tulsa area I could stay at, I told them Tulsa. That was two weeks ago. After calling repeatedly they said they couldn't find anyone in Tulsa. So, 5 weeks later its still not done.
If staying with the VA in OKC originally, it would have been done a month ago.
What a joke of a program.
 

John6185

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I’ve seen patients come to the OKC VA and get travel pay just to get a bottle of booze, patients come in for lab work at 0730 and have to wait until the afternoon to see their provider then they get a meal ticket to eat in the VA inpatient cafeteria. One glaucoma patient (non-service connected) traveled in a taxi from Tulsa! I was told to put him in front of the other patients who had been waiting all morning into the afternoon to be seen-why? Because the taxi was waiting outside with the meter running waiting to take him back to Tulsa and the VA was paying for the taxi. That day I was very vocal.
 

dennishoddy

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I’ve seen patients come to the OKC VA and get travel pay just to get a bottle of booze, patients come in for lab work at 0730 and have to wait until the afternoon to see their provider then they get a meal ticket to eat in the VA inpatient cafeteria. One glaucoma patient (non-service connected) traveled in a taxi from Tulsa! I was told to put him in front of the other patients who had been waiting all morning into the afternoon to be seen-why? Because the taxi was waiting outside with the meter running waiting to take him back to Tulsa and the VA was paying for the taxi. That day I was very vocal.
Man, I've never heard of that. In larger cities there are lots of veterans organizations like the VFW and American Legion that run shuttle busses every day. I see them at the entrance to the OKC VA Hospital every time I go there which isn't often, but none the less, they are there.
 

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