On the VA, ‘Blame Bush’ Doesn’t Fly

@Kraken: 43

Honestly, how the free-love flower children fundamentally transformed into fascist supporters of the heavy hand of government is one of the biggest unexplored sociological mysteries of the 20th Century.

Excellent statement Kraken, and I’d really like to hear from a Dimocrat how they morphed from the anti government hippies of the sixties to the ‘government is the answer to everything’ today. I think it was when they realized that if they didn’t want to work or accomplish anything that if they voted for the Dimocrats that the Dimocrats would keep them in welfare, unemployment, food stamps and free abortions. That’s when they decided they loved socialism.

@Redteam:

Thank you. I don’t know what the answer is, but I’d like to see an in depth examination of the matter. The only thing I can think of right away is that the ingrained hypocrisy of leftist thought refuses to abide by control over themselves while simultaneously wanting control over everyone else.

@Greg: How does the private sector get the customer back if they do not provide services acceptable to the customer? See in the private sector, people have choices and they vote with their feet. Not so with government controlled sectors! You just described Obama Care you dummy!

@Kraken, #53:

Wait until the Collective imposes an inferior single-payer system. Let’s see if the IPAB Death Panel allows you to have any of those expensive prescription drugs.

That doesn’t address the relevant observation, which was that any number of private sector enterprises will cheerfully rob you and/or the taxpayers blind the moment they can get away with it.

There are no “Death Panels.” Perhaps there might as well have been, however, when one part of the private sector was routinely denying many very sick people health insurance, while another part routinely charges hundreds of dollars per month for life-preserving medication that it costs them a handful of pocket change per month to manufacture and distribute. (Multiply by however many such medications are required by the hapless customer to remain alive.)

Then you haven’t been to the DMV or the Post Office recently. You haven’t paid property taxes, or have been forced by your municipality to repaint or reside your house, or perform some other expensive renovation based on arbitrary standards.

My recent dealings with Indiana’s DMV have all been entirely satisfactory. I pay less than I used to, and not just because I’m driving an older vehicle. Fees and excise taxes in general have been reduced.

I’m also entirely happy with my dealings with the United States Postal Service, which provides me with very reliable service at very reasonable rates. My property taxes have also gone down in recent years. By quite a lot. My property insurance, on the other hand, has increased quite dramatically for no apparent reason. The company probably thinks I’m not paying attention. They’ll discover that I have been. That will be an example of free market forces at work.

I’ve been waiting for energy prices to skyrocket, as long predicted. There’s every reason to expect that they might, because global energy demands are rising as a result of 2nd World industrialization. So far, other than the cost of gasoline, they haven’t. There’s been a long but steady climb. Gasoline price spikes seem to be driven by speculation—a free market phenomenon.

@Greg:

Right….you can lie all you want, Greg, spewing your nonsense talking points about “there are no death panels” under obamacare. You are either a despicable liar, or you are too ignorant to understand the very essence of the IPAB. The design of IPAB is specifically to limit treatment options physicians are allowed to use to only those deemed by bureaucrats -unaccountable in any way to actual patients – to be “cost effective”. This is the same sort of setup the british NHS has that denies treatments like dialysis to patients beyond a certain age, or spinal surgeries for children who need them to be able to walk – yet will pay 4800 British pounds to cover a 20 something “actress’s” boob job.

The other thing interesting is you mention living in Indiana, so your state taxes haven’t gone up – yet you don’t seem to understand you have a republican controlled state government determining such policies.

Having worked in the socialist medical system of the military and now in the for profit system, there is no question for profit medicine is much quicker at responding to improving patient satisfaction issues like wait times and bedside manner. You leftists consistently blather against “corporations” and “monopolies” being evil and not caring about individuals, yet you insanely argue in support of the worst, most ineffective monopoly of all, single payer/big government socialism.

@Greg:

That doesn’t address the relevant observation, which was that any number of private sector enterprises will cheerfully rob you and/or the taxpayers blind the moment they can get away with it.

But that isn’t reality. That’s just Marxist woe-is-me delusion. This is the kind of garbage that Soviet propaganda pushed. It’s unfortunate that the altered patchouli scented mush inside your head has bought into it.

There are no “Death Panels.”

Well of course there is. Socialized medicine cannot exist without them; it’s the nature of the beast.

Democrat Howard Dead wrote point blank in his WSJ op-ed,

“The IPAB is essentially a health-care rationing body.

By setting doctor reimbursement rates for Medicare and determining which procedures and drugs will be covered and at what price, the IPAB will be able to stop certain treatments its members do not favor by simply setting rates to levels where no doctor or hospital will perform them.”

That’s what a death panel is.

It will be interesting to see how many times you’ll need to be presented with this information before the Collective allows you to process it.

I’m also entirely happy with my dealings with the United States Postal Service, which provides me with very reliable service at very reasonable rates. My property taxes have also gone down in recent years. By quite a lot. My property insurance, on the other hand, has increased quite dramatically for no apparent reason. The company probably thinks I’m not paying attention. They’ll discover that I have been. That will be an example of free market forces at work.

I’ve been waiting for energy prices to skyrocket, as long predicted. There’s every reason to expect that they might, because global energy demands are rising as a result of 2nd World industrialization. So far, other than the cost of gasoline, they haven’t. There’s been a long but steady climb. Gasoline price spikes seem to be driven by speculation—a free market phenomenon.

Let me ask you this. Why stay here? And I really don’t mean this to be any kind of love it or leave it comment.

But the economic policies you support are already in place in nations like China, Russia, Cuba, or Venezuela which is no longer able to supply toilet paper.

I mean, wouldn’t you be much happier living in a nation where the economic policies you support are already in place?

@Kraken, #62:

That doesn’t address the relevant observation, which was that any number of private sector enterprises will cheerfully rob you and/or the taxpayers blind the moment they can get away with it.

But that isn’t reality. That’s just Marxist woe-is-me delusion. This is the kind of garbage that Soviet propaganda pushed. It’s unfortunate that the altered mush inside your head has bought into it.But that isn’t reality. That’s just Marxist woe-is-me delusion.

Uh huh. So, what is this universally honored moral principle that keeps powerful elements of the private sector from extracting every nickel possible from the public whenever they’re in a position to do so?

By setting doctor reimbursement rates for Medicare and determining which procedures and drugs will be covered and at what price, the IPAB will be able to stop certain treatments its members do not favor by simply setting rates to levels where no doctor or hospital will perform them.”

What you’ve just described is what private sector insurance companies were in a position to do before the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In fact it’s precisely what they were doing, yet I never heard those who set reimbursement rates for medications and services and who decided what would be covered and what wouldn’t called Death Panels.

Seriously ill people were having their coverage dropped all the time. It wasn’t at all uncommon for insurance companies to refuse to pay for certain unusually expensive medications, or to refuse to pay for certain treatments or procedures that a treating doctor might classify as a patient’s only hope. Their only hope then became government payment through some taxpayer-funded program. This routine shifting of costs was nothing more than a publicly funded subsidy of private sector profits.

Abuses such as the foregoing were among the reasons the public was demanding action with regard to healthcare in the first place.

I mean, wouldn’t you be much happier living in a nation where the economic policies you support are already in place?

The economic systems of the nations you cite are nothing at all like those of the United States, and bear little or no resemblance to what I advocate. That they do is your delusion. You seem to believe that all thinking that’s to the left of your own is all the same. That everything to the left is one vast, monolithic, homogeneous sameness. This is apparently why some people can’t seem to tell the difference between a rational social insurance system like Social Security and a feature of some hardcore Marxist state. The fact that our senior citizens commonly have a Medicare card doesn’t mean we’re living in Venezuela or Cuba, or are headed in that direction.

Uh huh. So, what is this universally honored moral principle that keeps powerful elements of the private sector from extracting every nickel possible from the public whenever they’re in a position to do so?

I’m not sure that you can necessarily point to any quotation or regulation here. What you can do, is compare the economic status of nations that preserve free market private sector principals, with those who eschew and.or prohibit them. During the Cold War, we had a really good example in Berlin. Those contained within the East portion of Berlin by the Berlin Wall that employed the policies you support, would risk their lives to escape, even resorting to jumping out of 3 story windows in some cases. I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head of West Berliners desperately trying to penetrate the Wall in the opposite direction to pursue the promises of social justice and income equality. Here in America, people are still free to flee cities that are controlled by progressive economic policies as we see with the desiccated corpse that is Detroit.

What you’ve just described is what private sector insurance companies were in a position to do before the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Put the doobie down. It’s not my description. Rather, it’s Democrat Howard Dean’s description.

In fact it’s precisely what they were doing, yet I never heard those who set reimbursement rates for medications and services and who decided what would be covered and what wouldn’t called Death Panels.

Seriously ill people were having their coverage dropped all the time. It wasn’t at all uncommon for insurance companies to refuse to pay for certain unusually expensive medications, or to refuse to pay for certain treatments or procedures that a treating doctor might classify as a patient’s only hope. Their only hope then became government payment through some taxpayer-funded program. This routine shifting of costs was nothing more than a publicly funded subsidy of private sector profits.

Abuses such as the foregoing were among the reasons the public was demanding action with regard to healthcare in the first place.

Well that’s certainly the Collective’s ordered talking points. But how does it stack up to reality? Unsurprisingly, not so much.

Myth: Before Obamacare, there were routine plan cancelations in the individual market.
Many Obamacare defenders blame the discontinued policies on “bad apple insurers,”[7] claiming that it was typical in this market to have plan cancellations and that they are not a result of Obamacare.

For instance, former Obama Administration official Van Jones called the individual marketplace a “‘wild, wild west’ where people were denied coverage for pre-existing conditions and policyholders were continually dropped by insurers offering thin, sketchy coverage.”[8] In addition, President Obama said, “Before the Affordable Care Act, the worst of these plans routinely dropped thousands of Americans every single year.”[9]

But since the enactment of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), insurers have been broadly prohibited from canceling or refusing to renew coverage.[10] One of the few exceptions to that prohibition is if an insurer discontinues a particular plan or type of coverage. In such cases, the insurer must provide the affected individuals the option to enroll in any other applicable coverage that the insurer offers.

That is largely what happened with the 4.7 million plan cancelations that were reported at the end of 2013. The insurers were discontinuing their pre-Obamacare plans and offering policyholders replacement coverage that complied with Obamacare’s wide variety of new mandates and regulations.

I’ll head your comments about Heritage off at the pass by preemptively providing you with the following quote:

I get the impression that some people automatically discredit all media sources that disagree with them. The anathema list has become very long. Soon it will be easier just to list the approved outlets.

It’s important to understand here, that it wasn’t the public in general that was demanding action on health care. Rather, it was primarily misinformed activists and other unthinking malcontents within the Collective that were essentially pining for an inferior single payer system.

The economic systems of the nations you cite are nothing at all like those of the United States, and bear little or no resemblance to what I advocate. That they do is your delusion.

I never said that they do. It’s bizarre how you consistently argue against points that no one makes. Rather, what I did suggest, is that perhaps you would be happier living in those nations since their economic policies more closely resemble those that you support. The very nature of my suggestion indicates a difference between the two.

You seem to believe that all thinking that’s to the left of your own is all the same. That everything to the left is one vast, monolithic, homogeneous sameness.

It is. It’s the Collective.

This is apparently why some people can’t seem to tell the difference between a rational social insurance system like Social Security and a feature of some hardcore Marxist state. The fact that our senior citizens commonly have a Medicare card doesn’t mean we’re living in Venezuela or Cuba, or are headed in that direction.

If we’re not, then why does the Collective eternally pine for an inferior single payer system?

@Greg:

Republicans have done everything in their power to shift public perceptions.

Republicans did not do the study of claim denials under health insurance provides that shows that government run health care denies more claims than any provider in the private section. But you don’t want to discuss that, do you, Greggie? It doesn’t fit with your DNC generated talking points.

They had years when they could have addressed these problems in their own fashion.

And Obama’s had over five years to clean up the VA, another campaign promise not kept.

Has Mitch McConnell explained to Kentucky voters yet that his pledge to kill Obamacare is nothing less than a pledge to kill Kynect, which has made health coverage available to over 400,000 Kentuckians who didn’t previously have it

Obviously, since he is 7 points in the lead. Or do you think those RCP stats that show Obamacare is becoming less popular, instead of more popular, are just outliers?

@Kraken, #69:

President Obama won with only 53% of the vote.

This is what is commonly known as a majority.

Has Mitch McConnell explained to Kentucky voters yet that his pledge to kill Obamacare is nothing less than a pledge to kill Kynect, which has made health coverage available to over 400,000 Kentuckians who didn’t previously have it?

What Kos Kid article are you parroting?

McConnell’s deer-in-the-headlight moment (at the 0:58 mark) was captured by WHAS Channel 11 News of Louisville, Kentucky. I don’t need a Kos Kid to tell me when someone is clueless. Microphone-becomes-hot-potato. HA!

Republicans seem to want to make Obamacare the central issue of the midterm elections. Fine. Let their opponents talk about what repeal would mean in real world terms, on a state-by-state basis.

@Greg: “This is what is commonly known as a majority.” Would a 4% margin of victory have held up had Obama’s willful lies about how his health care law would affect voters been known then? Had the truth been told about his lies about his foreign policy incompetence and a major national security failure in Benghazi, could he have won? Had the corrupt media not refused to report the facts of his dismal failure on the economy and unemployment, would he have been victorious? Did suppressing the opposition with the IRS assure victory? Had this current scandal and how he politicized the VA, then forgot them after the first election been revealed, would he be President instead of Romney? Some polls say “no”.

@Greg:

What evidence is there that the average government employee doesn’t care about his or her job?

Aside from the usual, looks like we’ve got some more evidence today.

A new VA internal audit found wait-list fraud at almost two-thirds of all VA facilities, and that 13% of schedulers had been trained to commit fraud as part of their work.

“boxes and boxes” of echocardiograms went unread for weeks and in some cases not read until after the patients died

@Greg:

Here’s some more evidence:

Over the last 15 months, 52 unclaimed bodies of U.S. military veterans accumulated at the Los Angeles County morgue because nobody arranged transportation to Riverside National Cemetery for burial.

@Greg:

Or you could consider the fact that the Collective routinely confuses freedom of religion, with freedom from religion. Much in the same way that it routinely confuses governance with rulership.

Or you could consider the fact that all three religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, pay homage to the Old Testament.

Or you could consider the fact that both Christianity and Islam pay homage to the Al-Injil.

Or you consider the fact that VAs have limited space and can’t accommodate every faith that exists on the planet in a finite chapel, and have to focus on the majority of their patients.

Or you could consider the fact that the Collective routinely confuses non-denominational paraphernalia with strictly Christian paraphernalia.

Or you could consider the simple reality, that the Collective despises specific religious faiths as fascists tend to do, and only supports those that express their own Anti-American viewpoints, and/or those of New Age origin.

Or you could consider that the curtains are merely another expression of liberal tolerance.

Funny how there wasn’t any reported problems with the chapel, until the Collective gained control over the VA.

In fact, as usual, there still aren’t any reported problems by friends and families of veterans who might not happen to be Christian. As always, these problems emerge only from the imaginations of Collective Drones who routinely obsess over hypothetical offendedness.

This silly story is the sort of crapola often served up by FOX News. Sometimes the spin is so ridiculously obvious that closing your eyes and whacking your forehead down onto your palm seems like the only reasonable reaction.

I get the impression that some people automatically discredit all media sources that disagree with them. The anathema list has become very long. Soon it will be easier just to list the approved outlets.

Do you ever tire of having your hypocrisy highlighted?

People who think Medicare/Medicaid are such a great deal in comparison to the allegedly evil, profit driven private insurance companies need to get a clue.

I deal with the billing and reimbursement rates for.my ICU. The dirty little secret the leftists in governmnet don’t want you to know is that Medicare/aid only pay 11-15% of the billed charges for care, while the private insurance companies pay over 60% of the charges. In essence, private insurance companies are already heavily subsidizing Medicare/aide patient care costs – but are still able to make a profit despite the additional costs of covering the shortfall from government controlled “insurance”. The reality is if you could get government completely out of the medical insurance industry, such that private insurance companies no longer had to subsidize government insurance, the cost of medical care would go down.

So long as politicians are invested in the inefficient socialist concept of forcing private companies to subsidize health care as a means of buying tbe votes of the uneducated, greedy and lazy, you will continue to see medical costs rise beyond the rate of inflation. Politicians never do anything in an efficient, cost effective manner, because they expect egregiously exhorbitant payoff for their involvement. Furthermore, you will.see these politicians vociferously work to shift the blame to hospitals, doctors and pharmaceutical companies, rather than accept blame where it squarely belongs.

As obamacare continues to make it more difficult for patients to obtain true medical care, you best hope you have a good friend who happens to be a physician to help when you need a doctor…..until the government makes it illegal for physicians to treat patients outside of government controlled access, that is…..

@retire05:

The AMA back in the 50s and 60s had 60-80% of physicians as members. Today, barely 19% of doctors belong to the AMA because most physicians do not feel it represents their interests, since it has gotten on bed with the statists.

There is not a single private pediatrician in my hometown that accepts medicaid patients. That is going to become even more of a problem as obamacare comes into greater effect.

@retire05:

The Houston’s Physician’s Journal reported a couple of years ago that less than 50% of Texas doctors would now accept Medicare

I don’t really understand this attitude unless they have plenty of patients that can afford to pay cash for even higher rates for office visits. The rate my PC phys. charges seems a little high to me, but it’s probably reasonable, but he gets paid about 96% of what he charges. I know I don’t have to have insurance that covers the difference, but I have it for the other charges, not office visit charges. For example those hospital charges in the many thousands of dollars where my part would also be thousands of dollars. Medicare makes their payments promptly and the insur company, Mutual of Omaha makes their’s very promptly also. (at least according to the dates that they state that they pay them)