One of the memes that have developed during the fight to repeal and replace Obamacare is that no matter what the Republicans do, the United States is headed inexorably to a single payer, government-run Health Care System. Some, like Charles Krauthammer, fear it. Others, like Sen Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, eagerly anticipate it. For those who have not been warned off of the temptation to place out healthcare in the hands of the same people who run the IRS, the Washington Free Beacon reports on an OIG report that 117 patients died while on a waiting list for care at a single Va Hospital in Los Angeles in a nine month period.
The story is sadly familiar to those who have followed the scandal for the past few years. Incompetent VA employees, who are all but impossible to be fired thanks to civil service rules, do not follow proper procedures, resulting in a backlog in which veterans are kept waiting for health care, many of who die as a result.
Democrats have been yammering that thousands, perhaps million will die if the Republicans succeed in repealing and replacing Obamacare. They might want to pay attention to what started to happen on President Barack Obama’s watch. President Trump is attempting to address the problem, with measures proposed to allow veterans to seek private care payed for by the VA and to make firing incompetent VA employees easier.
The point, of course, is that a nationwide single-payer, government run health care system has every possibility of being like the VA system writ large. Imagine being told by a doctor that you have cancer but not getting to see an oncologist for several weeks, leaving you to wonder whether the disease will progress enough in the meantime to make treatment problematic.
Or, perhaps, the doctor informs you that you need something less drastic, say a knee replacement. But you can’t get a surgical procedure for some months, and in the meantime, you’re left dealing with the excruciating pain.
Fortunately, with the addition of private healthcare options, the VA is going in the opposite direction of where advocates of socialistic medicine want the United States to head.
That policy could serve as an example for how health care policy should be crafted, adding more choice rather than chasing the chimera of absolute health care security paid for by someone else.
The disaster of Obamacare should have taught people the perils of letting the government run healthcare. Perhaps, if the example of those veterans being left to die by a system that was supposed to help them turns us away from single payer, they will not have died entirely in vain.
