The VA And IRS

 

By Rick Beottger

 

Acronyms everyone knows—the Veterans Administration and Internal Revenue Service. Especially now, as both are being crucified in Congress and the media. A perfect time for me to step in and say, Congress and the media are wrong, because both the VA and IRS are doing bang-up wonderful jobs.

 

 

I know this as a long-time intimate consumer of both services. I blew my knee out in basic training doing a trial exercise. Banned after six months because it was blowing out so many knees: Running 150 yards with a man your own weight on your back, as if rescuing him from the field (they returned to the grenade throw).

 

 

I just recently realized what a lucky break this was. My dad, brother and daughter all have the same knee injury I have. But mine was worth over a million bucks. Not just the currently $258 tax-free per month as 20% disabled, but free health care for life. Also, with good knees, I probably would have been a tennis teaching pro, as athletics has always been my first love. With sports out, I was forced to use Plan B, becoming a business professor, which paid multiples of Plan A.

 

 

So I’ve been going to the VA starting when they sucked in the mid-’70s and continuing as they became the best health care anywhere about 10 years ago. The Rand Co. quotes Phillip Longman, senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of a book about the VA called Best Care Anywhere: “Health-care providers practice in teams and doctors are salaried as opposed to being paid a fee for service. That helps remove an incentive to order tests and procedures that aren’t necessary, a key problem in the broader U.S. health system when physicians practice defensive medicine or try to maximize their income.”

 

 

My personal experience is I have had the same doctor and nurse for 10 years who are superbly competent, know everything about me and care. I get preventative medicine, not excessive tests or expensive but unnecessary procedures. I don’t wait more than 10 minutes in the waiting room. I can drop in to see a nurse any day. If I have to go to the emergency room, the VA covers it. And any VA in the world has my full medical records on file electronically.

 

 

I’m not special. Ask anyone you know who uses the VA here. We know how good we’ve got it.

 

 

Yes, people have died waiting for care out west. Those errors were real, and the perverse thing is that a system which was intended to enforce timely care was badly enough designed that gaming it caused the opposite. (My tenure piece in Organizational Science was about such perverse incentive systems.) But patients die for a myriad of reasons in all forms of health care, and the facts are that overall the VA outperforms the rest.

 

 

Now my friends at the VA would probably wish I stopped here, so as not to be lumped in with the IRS, the most hated institution in America besides Congress. ( I will NOT defend Congress.) But the facts are that when they were investigating the Tea Party organizations trying to lie their way into getting non-profit status, they were in fact far too lenient, not discriminatory.

 

 

I know what it takes to be a non-profit. I probably do more 501c3 non-profit form 990s than anyone else in town. I’m becoming treasurer of an international nonprofit transitioning from the U.S. To Switzerland. The rules are in general clear: You cannot get tax deductions for political contributions. If you were one of those contributing to former county mayor Mario Di Gennaro’s $93,000, landslide defeat by David Rice, you didn’t get a tax deduction. Greenpeace and Mother Jones are not deductible. So the Tea Party groups should similarly not have been eligible.

 

 

But it is now part of the general corruption, in which corporations are people who can make unlimited political contributions, that we expect everyone to be able to make anonymous, tax-deductible donations to new “educational” groups whose entire purpose is political. Yes, more conservative than liberal groups were asked questions, but that’s because far more applied. And the worst part is, all were granted non-profit status! That is the crime, not the questioning.

 

 

We live in a very mixed-up world.

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