Dive Brief:

• Tenet Healthcare Corp. and TriWest Healthcare Alliance on June 25 announced an agreement to expand access to healthcare services for veterans in Arizona, California, Missouri, Tennessee and Texas. It's the first agreement between Tenet and Phoenix-based TriWest, which offers behavioral health, crisis management and counseling services to military families and vets.
• As a result of the collaboration, veterans will gain access to 41 hospitals, 19 urgent care centers, seven freestanding emergency departments, 18 ambulatory surgery centers, 85 diagnostic imaging centers and nearly 600 employed physicians. 
• Under the agreement, information will be shared between VA healthcare facilities and Tenet facilities. 

Dive Insight:

The Tenet/TriWest partnership, coming in response to major delays for veterans' healthcare services within the struggling VA, will offer more options to vets, "supplementing the capabilities of the Dept. of Veterans Affairs and providing expedited care at a time when it is needed most," a Tenet executive said. VA officials said June 19 that they had reached out to 70,000 veterans to get them off waiting lists and into clinics, but conceded there is "still much more work to be done."

Dr. Kim-Lien Nguyen, director of the cardiac ambulatory clinic at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, urged vets to "take ownership" over their healthcare in a June 27 opinion piece in Forbes.  He argued there is no coherent co-payment system in the VA system giving incentives to vets to think through healthcare decisions. He also noted that, contrary to conventional wisdom, VA healthcare is free only to veterans with severe, service-related conditions. He described the VA as having a "byzantine" coinsurance system linking care costs to a vet's condition, and the degree to which a condition is service-related. Thus, he argued that vets "face perverse incentives to let their health deteriorate to the point where they can avoid copays and get higher monthly financial support."

Congressional bills aimed at letting vets seek private care at the government's expense if they face excessive wait times or live too far from VA facilities might improve access and foster competition for vets' care, the VA doctor said, but that would only be a modest step forward. Instead, he argued, there must be wholesale change to the basic framework of the VA healthcare system.