Dominant Logistics
Solving the "Health Care Crisis"
Many believe that there is an ongoing health care crisis in America and these concerns are quite justified. Costs are spiraling out of control, there is a clear lack of available nurses, and veterans in particular are having to wait months and even years for the basic health care needs they are entitled to having given their all in past conflicts. While there are many ways to address this problem, I think the first step must be one that nobody has been talking about.
The military has thousands of trained medical personnel in active and reserve forces that quite frankly serve little to no useful purpose when not deployed. Typically, they man the local clinics where they waste their time and training treating soldiers who usually have problems no more serious than a cold or a rash. At the same time, in the inner cities of America, emergency rooms are overloaded and understaffed struggling to treat major trauma injuries, gunshot wounds, stabbing wounds, malnutrition, and other problems that tend to exist only in the inner cities of the United States. But these are the same types of situations our military medics NEED to be training and practicing to deal with.
By law, hospitals cannot refuse to treat anyone who walks in the door, regardless of their needs or their ability to pay. While I don't disagree with this policy per se, we must acknowledge that there is a limit to the services that these hospitals can provide under these circumstances and by many measures, our emergency medical infrastructure is nearly maxed out. Could the solution be more clear?
Every major metropolitan area in the United States should have at least one, 24 hour a day, 7 day a week clinic in operation that is manned predominantly by military medics. Regular rotations should be made to run these personnel through the emergency rooms of these inner city areas so that the hospitals get free additional personnel in exchange for providing our medics with the best training and experience that can be provided to them short of actual war. The hospitals get the help they need to keep costs under control while the military gets better medics, at no costs to consumers or taxpayers.
This also makes another obvious option available. Instead of forcing hospitals to treat non-emergency cases that cannot pay for services, they could instead provide transportation of these people to the military clinics that will always be available. While this will place a massive burden on the military medics, it will also prepare them for the types of situations they will have to deal with when they go abroad, where they will face massive numbers of people who have had no or very little medical assistance in years.
Another obvious side benefit to this program would be that civilian medical personnel would have immediate access to military medics in times of crisis like a terrorist strike or an incident involving chemical, biological, or even nuclear weapons. Most civilian medics have no background with these issues and the military medics will have a wealth of information to share with them.
The on-post clinics and VA services could then be sold off and the military and veteran personnel be placed on a private medical plan where they can get better treatment at a lower cost to the government and taxpayers. In times of deployment, there will still be military medics available but they will be better trained for the realities they will be facing through this program. In essence, this one common sense approach can significantly improve our military medical capabilities, lower our civilian health care costs, and better prepare us for homeland defense issues.