Thankless but Necessary

Sometimes I'm really glad I don't run things. My comment on the air show post alluded to the fact that I'm glad I'm not the guy that makes the decision about how much fuel to burn during a season's worth of air shows with the sole purpose of recruiting people to join the military. That seems like a real hard job to me. Maybe it's easy for him or her, but I don't think it would be easy for me. I'd struggle. I'd want to use the money for other things. But I'd still want the jets to fly. I'd have a headache.

Which got me to thinking about something that has come up in my conversations over the past year.

To summarize my work from July last year to June this, I worked at a Chicago VA hospital, and as I've mentioned before, it was the most profound, important, unbelievable experience of my life. If offered a job at the VA...with the stipulation that I'd have to keep the job for 30 years...I'd take it today.

So the VA has come up in my conversations. Not always for the better. It is an unbelievably flawed system. It is (I think) more than $3 billion underfunded. Too few workers, too many patients, antiquated facilities (not everywhere, but lotsofwhere). Kinda dirty. Chaos. People are overworked and probably underpaid. Patients have a hard time filling out forms and following the papertrail and getting appropriate coverage. Getting the correct care can be way difficult. Stuff falls through the cracks constantly. It will get worse over the next bunch of decades.

But the people that work there are flat-out the best caregivers on the planet. Sure, there are bad eggs, and those bad eggs are very rotten. But those people are the vast minority, and the quality, genuine caregivers are abundant. They are inspiring.

I have said the above before. Here's the other part.

The VA is an impossible system to run or to fix. The VA is in the business of caring and not caring for its patients simultaneously. The VA simply cannot dole out every service for no cost to the millions it serves, but it can't really fairly deny services either. So the reconciliation of that is impossible and messy.

My last day on the unit, it was announced that the food budget had been cut. The food budget! Phenomenal. That said, the patients were unbelievably well cared for, and if you have an annual budget with $3 billion of red ink, I'm not sure how you don't cut a little bit of everything. You aren't going to cut surgeries or appointments or staff...oh wait, yes you are. It all gets cut. Which is wrong, but the guy doing the cutting is not the guy deciding how much money he has. He's TOLD how much money to spend. And he's 3 bil short. So, ah, give 'em one less piece of toast for breakfast, and maybe a smaller pile of peas at night.

And what I'm trying to say here is that I'M REALLY GLAD I DON'T HAVE THAT JOB, because it's probably the most no-winning not-a-right-solution can't-figure-it-out job in the world. Talk about thankless. It would be impossible and heartbreaking and man oh man would I have a headache.