Oh Dongjin, Lee Keon-Hyung, Park Jongsun
Graduate School of Defense Management, Korea National Defense University, Nonsan 33021, Korea.
Askew School of Public Administration and Policy, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA.
Healthcare (Basel). 2022 Jun 13;10(6):1101. doi: 10.3390/healthcare10061101.
The Veterans Health Administration (VHA), responsible for providing 9 million veterans with quality healthcare, is not insulated from concerns about efficiency. In the aftermath of the Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital scandal in 2014, Congress passed the Veterans Choice Act of 2014, which allows eligible veterans to use non-VA hospitals instead of VA hospitals. After analyzing 118 or 119 VA hospitals each year from 2012 through 2017 in the U.S, this paper evaluates the efficiency scores of VA hospitals and examines how the 2014 Act has influenced their technical efficiency over time. Slack analysis shows that inefficient VA hospitals can improve efficiency by reallocating input resources, and regression analysis demonstrates that the overall technical efficiency of VA hospitals decreased by 0.164 after the implementation of the Act. This means that as more veterans used non-VA hospitals under the 2014 Act, the technical efficiency of VA hospitals decreased considerably. Given that a substantial portion of veterans' demands for healthcare transferred out to non-VA hospitals, the VHA should evaluate whether the current capacity of VA hospitals is appropriate and try to reduce wasted input resources to improve efficiency.
负责为900万退伍军人提供优质医疗保健服务的退伍军人健康管理局（VHA）也无法回避对效率的担忧。在2014年退伍军人事务部（VA）医院丑闻之后，国会通过了《2014年退伍军人选择法案》，该法案允许符合条件的退伍军人使用非VA医院而非VA医院。通过对2012年至2017年美国每年118家或119家VA医院进行分析，本文评估了VA医院的效率得分，并研究了2014年法案随时间推移如何影响其技术效率。松弛分析表明，效率低下的VA医院可以通过重新分配投入资源来提高效率，回归分析表明，该法案实施后，VA医院的总体技术效率下降了0.164。这意味着，随着更多退伍军人根据《2014年法案》使用非VA医院，VA医院的技术效率大幅下降。鉴于退伍军人对医疗保健的大量需求转移到了非VA医院，VHA应评估VA医院目前的容量是否合适，并试图减少浪费的投入资源以提高效率。
