The VA delivers health care to around nine million veterans each year at more than 1,200 sites across the country. In Wounds of War, Gordon described the VA as resembling “the health care systems of almost all other industrialized nations: a full-service health care system that both pays for and delivers all types of care to those it serves.”

The incentives in the private health care sector push patients toward expensive and sometimes unnecessary care at the expense of investing in primary care, says Dana Brown, director of the Next System Project at the Democracy Collaborative, where she has done extensive research on health care systems. The VA’s system uses a collaborative approach, where health care workers are in contact with one another.

Read the entire article at The Progressive.