Military Update: GAO upset with DOD medical system plan By Tom Philpott, Special to Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Saturday, November 3, 2007
The Government Accountability Office has chided the Department of Defense for adopting a restructuring plan for the military health system without conducting a comprehensive analysis of the costs, benefits and risks.
The GAO report released in October also suggests that Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England opted for the path of least resistance last November when he rejected three options for consolidating Army, Navy and Air Force medical bureaucracies in favor of a plan that merely would combine some key support functions such as finance, logistics and medical research.
Phased implementation of this option is under way, but it won’t be too far along by January 2009 when a new administration assumes control.
Influencing England, officials said last December, were Air Force arguments that cultural differences between the services make a unified medical command impractical and could harm medical readiness.
The Navy, Army and joint staff had endorsed a unified command. They were backed by an advisory board of business executives and by a Pentagon working group established specifically to weigh alternatives for restructuring the health care system. The Center for Naval Analyses projected annual savings of hundreds of millions of dollars.
England rejected three options presented to him for a joint or unified command. Instead, he embraced a fourth developed by his senior advisers. This plan calls for keeping the three service medical departments but combining some support functions. This “incremental” approach, officials argue, would also result in cost efficiencies while preserving the service-unique cultures of the three medical components.
Rest of article at:
http://stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=49988
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