The author is a journalist who looked into the fact that the Bush Administration was not providing adequate post-theater medical care for Veterans. Many VA hospitals were old and neglected. More recently, however, the VA has become a real medical care success story. This surprise turnaround is documented by Phillip Longman in this book.

The Department of Veterans Affairs health-care system was a dysfunctional, scandal-prone bureaucracy. It is now the benchmark for high-quality medicine in the United States. Even more importantly, Best Care Anywhere shows that almost everything Americans are told to believe by the media about health, health care, and medical economics is simply wrong.

Our Veterans and their families now enjoy real health as a result of serious health care. The VA is now very popular with veterans. I speak from personal experience as well. The VA is what is known as a Single-Payer system.

The biggest single source of high medical costs, and the fastest growing segment, is the private insurance administrative costs and profits. The CEOs are some of the richest people on the planet, they do not contribute any skills to medical care, but they remove dollars that would otherwise go to care in a Single Payer system. The VA model 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. ( )