Aging Veterans: Will They Overwhelm the VA Medical Care System

摘要

The focus of this paper is the extent to which veterans in different age groups and with different types of insurance coverage in fact used the VA system in 1977 and are likely to use it in the future. These estimates are based on the use of three VA services: short-term hospital inpatient care, ambulatory physician services, and prescribed medicine use. Also, this examination of health care utilization patterns of veterans has been limited to the probability that a veteran will have used the VA health care system in the course of a year for the three specified services; but the amount of use of these services is not discussed. The emphasis of this analysis, therefore, is not on producing national estimates of use of the VA health care system but rather on issues related to which veterans use the VA and why, and what impact this is likely to have on the VA health care system in the future. The analysis is based on data from the National Medical Care Expenditure Survey (NMCES), a household survey of the civilian noninstitutionalized population in 1977.