Sick Call: The Current State of the Department of Veteran Affairs

The Department of Veteran Affairs is the second largest government agency behind the Department of Defense. The former is charged with the aftercare of our United States Military veterans. The VA is at a crossroads of care, as it is a public institution that now implements, and indeed may begin to implement many more aspects of privatization. As with the general study of public administration the issue of privatization is a weighty one that is often embedded in the politics of the day. The vastness of the VA is only surpassed by the ethical weight of its mission to care for the veterans of the United States. Research principles espoused by public administrators were used to attempt to find the efficacy of including tenets of the private sector into the daily practices of the VA. In the research it was made clear that some ideas bore of the private sector, such as the Veteran's Choice Act, have served our veterans' medical needs rather well.