A glimpse of our health care future courtesy of the VA.
What started as a story of bureaucratic malfeasance at the Veterans Administration hospital in Phoenix, Arizona is quickly turning into a national scandal.
In Arizona, it came to light that VA Hospital administrators were cooking the books to make it look like eligible veterans seeking appointments for medical care were being seen in a timely manner. In fact, there was an ‘off-the-books’ waiting list containing the names of hundreds of veterans who were waiting for months or even years to be seen. According to reports, as many as 40 died while waiting for the medical attention they were promised in return for serving their country.
Since that revelation, we are hearing similar stories from all over the country on an almost daily basis. The Veterans Administration is being revealed as a lumbering, bureaucratic and sclerotic government agency that cannot carry out its mission and goes to great lengths to hide that fact.
The VA is charged with many duties attendant to serving America’s military veterans but by far the highest of those duties is attending to their medical care. In that regard, the VA is a perfect example of a single-payer health care system. Given what we are now seeing from the VA, charged with providing health care to approximately nine million veterans, how does anyone imagine that the same federal government can successfully provide health care to 300 million of us?
How many will die if the Department of Health & Human Services becomes to the U.S. general population what the Veterans Administration is to our military veterans?
Good analogy & horrific example; but as in other good analogy or examples it will not be absorbed nor heed learned by those who don’t want to see or heed it.
Many see only what they want to see or learn what they wish learn
even Jesus came to bring sight to the blind.
Still many ignore even that.
The truth will set you free but 1st it hurts like the dickens.
Glad to see this point made, Paul. When these further problems at the VA came to light, my first thought was, “This is how government “health care” works, or to be more precise, fails to work. If the government can’t/won’t be honest and reliable in caring for our best, our heroes, what can we expect of a similar system designed for ordinary citizens, including millions who will pay nothing for what they get. And it may turn out that even those who pay nothing will find themselves overcharged.
How timely this being sent. My husband just got back from an appointment at the VA in Temple. He said that it is nothing like it was just a couple of years ago, having gone down hill at an advanced rate. The thing is, like all government ran agencies, YOU have to wait on them to schedule you an appointment. This may take weeks or months, at their determination. If obama has his way, we will be like the VA in short order and people will NOT be getting the treatment needed by our healthcare providers! People didn’t believe there were death panels in the pages of obamacare…now those doubters are finding out there really was/is. We are seeing the results starting with our veterans!
For another analogy, just go to your local post office during busy periods and contrast that with going to Federal Express or UPS during busy periods. It will open your eyes to the difference between bloated government bureaucracy and leam mean corporate policies aimed at serving customers for profit.