Phillip Longman tells the amazing story of the turnaround of the Department of Veterans Affairs health-care system from a dysfunctional, scandal-prone bureaucracy into the benchmark for high-quality medicine in the United States. Best Care Anywhere shows that vast swaths of what we think we know about health, health care, and medical economics are just plain wrong. And the book demonstrates how this extraordinarily cost-effective model, which has proven to be highly popular with veterans, can be made available to everyone. New to this edition is an analysis of how the shortcomings of both so-called Obamacare and Republican plans to privatize Medicare reinforce the need for applying the lessons of the VA. Also included are completely updated statistics and research, as well as examples of how the private sector is already beginning to learn from the VA's example.

The VA, through the Vets Health Admin. (VHA), provides a majority of medical services to vets within its health care system. However, in some instances, VHA is authorized to send the vet outside of VA¿s health care system to seek care. VHA has established a demonstration program to enhance the existing fee basis care program that was named Project HERO (Healthcare Effectiveness through Resource Optimization). Contents of this report: (1) Intro. and Overview; (2) Project HERO; (3) Fee Basis Care; (4) How Project HERO Works Compared to Fee Basis Care; (5) Project HERO Implementation; (6) Has Project HERO Enhanced the Fee Basis Care Program? Illustrations. This is a print on demand edition of an important, hard-to-find report.