Rare News Desk
If the government will ration, neglect and deny our wounded warriors’ health care needs, why would anyone think Obamacare will be any better?
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President Obama and Democrats keep boasting that Obamacare will provide Americans will excellent insurance, at least eventually, and that the quality of care will improve. Oh, and all that coverage and coordinated care will lower costs. Try telling that to our veterans.
House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Chairman Jeff Miller (R-Fla.) held hearings around the country last year in order to hear from veterans about their government-provided health care, usually referred as the VA. It’s not a pretty picture.
While there are some very dedicated professionals in the VA system, including specialists for certain types of wounds that soldiers receive, veterans who have access to private health insurance opt out of the VA. And who can blame them?
There are whistleblowers complaining of poor sterilization practices and reusing of implements that should have been discarded, infecting vets with HIV; long delays in treating patients that are resulting in their deaths, including at least six at one hospital; and a backlog of more than 400,000 vets who have filed disability claims, in many cases more than a year ago, but have yet to be processed.
Oh, and here’s one you’ll love from U.S. News and World Report. “Since 2008, the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs have spent over $1 billion to create an integrated electronic health record. Four years and $1 billion later, not a single line of code has been implemented.”
The U.S. News story came out last April, months before Obamacare’s disastrous website rollout. Another “preview,” if you will.
Defenders claim Obamacare is different because it uses private insurance. Though, the truth is that most of those defenders really want a single-payer health care system.
But the government will encounter the same problems with Obamacare it has with the VA: money, regulations and restrictions, and bureaucrats running the show.
The government will spend hundreds of billions of dollars providing people with subsidies to pay for Obamacare insurance. As health insurance premiums explode under Obamacare, the government will have to find a way to cut those costs, because it’s on the hook to pay a large portion of them.
In other words, the government won’t have enough money, so it will have to impose price controls and rationing—jut like the VA.
The government may, for example, make it harder to get certain prescription drugs or see a specialist. Both already happen in Medicaid, the government-run health insurance for the poor. That lack of access to physicians means that patients will have to wait in line, just as they do at the VA.
As Obamacare implodes the government will take tighter control of the system—not overnight, but eventually—essentially turning the health insurers into public utilities. Maybe we’ll start calling it “O-VAmacare.”
Seeing politicians stand up and praise our returning wounded warriors and yet never fixing their health care system is lesson in hypocrisy. But it’s also a lesson in what the public can expect under Obamacare.
