VA Health Scandals Foreshadow Life Under ObamaCare

IBD:

Government-run VA health clinics have been caught falsifying records to hide obscenely long and sometimes deadly delays in treating veterans. Welcome to the future of health care under ObamaCare.

The VA recently decided to investigate one of its Colorado outpatient clinics to see how it handled patient delays. What it found was shocking, but not surprising.

While delays for many of the 6,300 veterans treated at the clinic stretched out for months, clerks there were told to falsify dates so it appeared that everyone was being seen in a timely fashion. Those who didn’t play along ended up on a “bad boy list,” according to USA Today, which obtained a copy of the report.

This follows a report that 23 veterans relying on the VA died due to delayed cancer screenings. At least 40 others died waiting for appointments at a VA system in Phoenix. A retired VA doctor said many were on a “secret waiting list” designed to hide treatment delays.

Lawmakers, naturally, are expressing outrage and demanding answers. But the VA is just operating like other government-run health care systems, which are characterized by shortages, delays and rationing.

In Canada, researchers at the University of British Columbia found that two-thirds of Canadian patients who needed bypass surgery faced delays of more than three months and had an increased risk of dying as a result.

In Great Britain, rampant delays caused the government to declare in 2010 that no patient should have to wait four months for treatments authorized by a GP.

And a new report from the Royal College of Physicians found that nearly two-thirds of asthma deaths in the U.K. in 2012 were due to poor care, including doctors’ prescribing the wrong medications to keep costs down.

The VA isn’t unique in covering up rationing schemes. A government auditor in the U.K. found one in four of that country’s hospitals had been falsifying their waiting-list times so as not to breach official limits. Such rationing is also going on elsewhere in the U.S., although it largely escapes notice by the mainstream media.

Medicaid promises access to the poor, but pays doctors so little — less than 40% of what private insurers pay — that nearly a third refuse to take new Medicaid patients. In California, the refusal rate is close to 50%.

Unable to access doctors, or forced to wait interminably for appointments, many end up in hospital ERs.

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