The Patriot Post® · The VA and ObamaCare
Even if I, ensconced on my dream-like ivory tower down here in North Carolina, hadn’t watched some of the latest Sunday talk shows I had already heard from people in the elite, intellectual mainstream media all I needed to know about the so-called crisis in the government-run medical care system for military veterans.
The Sunday “Face the Nation” show was filled with phrases already heard, about veterans on waiting lists who died before they were seen, some even after they were cared “examined.”
There have been phrases used such as:
It is not a new problem, it has been going on forever.
The VA is a huge bureaucratic agency.
Hearing the same reports and the same solutions in the national mainstream media is no surprise.
After all, the “elite” of its members travel in the same personal and professional circuits.
They reinforce each others’ opinions and tend to write and speak as a pack.
Yet, even some of the more stupid news viewers and readers may be asking some of the same questions as I about the solutions being offered.
High on the solution list is to pour more government money into the problem; next is to study the problem; and third is to pontificate that the problem is another sure sign that bipartisanship is needed in Washington.
What seems to me remarkable and quite stupid of the supporters of the Obama administration is to openly applaud Obama’s move to allow veterans to be served by private hospitals.
Do they realize that they are admitting that health care run by the government doesn’t work?
Do they realize that directing people to use non-government health care services is the polar opposite of what the Affordable Health Care Act orders people to do?
Has it dawned on them yet that Obamacare is a government-run system? Are they even aware that health care insurance companies are merely agencies subsidized and hired by the federal government?
When you examine the workings of the Veterans Affairs Administration it looks eerily like drafters of the Obamacare law – it is a law, mind you – borrowed some of the former’s rules and regulations.
Some of the talking heads have tried to make excuses for the VA, albeit in a twisted way, saying that it is a huge bureaucracy, loaded with red tape.
Yet they helped create and still defend an arm of the government that promises to become many times over larger than the VA system.
It may take whiz kids in the current federal government less than a year to build the Obamacare system tangled enough to rival the VA in its complexity and foolish practices.
Maybe it’s time for civilians to get used to the quality of care military veterans have received for decades.
L.E. Brown, Jr. is an independent writer, based in Magnolia, N.C. Contact him at [email protected].