Welcome to Your Government-Provided Health Care Utopia

1. Vet Finally Gets Appointment to See His VA Doctor, Two Years After He Died.

Douglas Chase had brain cancer. His wife, Suzanne Chase, survives him.

In 2012, a year after her husband’s diagnosis, [Douglas] Chase attempted to move his care in Boston to a nearby veteran’s hospital in Bedford. [Suzanne] said they waited for four months with no reply but Doug died in August 2012.

Just two weeks ago, Chase received a letter from the VA finally responding to her appointment request.

"The letter invited him to make an appointment with primary care at the VA, if he so desired."

That's injury. Here's insult:

"Then at the bottom they said they wanted a quick response," Chase told ABC's Boston affiliate WCVB.

2. Vet Dies After Collapsing in VA Center Cafeteria, Waiting 30 Minutes for an Ambulance to Reach an ER That Was Only 500 Yards Away.

"A veteran who collapsed in an Albuquerque Veteran Affairs hospital cafeteria, 500 yards from the emergency room, died after waiting 30 minutes for an ambulance," the Associated Press reported on Thursday. "Officials at the hospital Thursday confirmed it took a half an hour for the ambulance to be dispatched and take the man from one building to the other, which is about a five minute walk."

Splendid.

We must not rest until these people are properly punished with bonuses and promotions.

3. VA Employees Diverted From Their Actual Jobs of Processing Vets' Applications to Fix Obamacare Enrollment Applications.

Sometimes, in your Socialized Medicine Future, your health is going to be less important than servicing the current political needs of the Rulership Class.

You're just going to have to get used to this, peons.

Cavuto: How is that performance measured?

Davis: That performance is measured based on our ability to turn around an application from beginning to end within a five-day turn around. There’s an acceptable percentage that we have to have, which is in excess of 80% for all applications that comes into that office. What you find is that there’s extensive pressure on the staff to process applications, to focus our attention to applications based on specific campaigns. For example, I shared with your producer that we actually put incoming applications aside so we could focus on the ACA related applications that came in over last summer. That's wrong. We should treat each veteran equally and focus on applications, as they come in, not because of special campaigns coming out of D.C.

Yes, government begins to grow even more corrupt in order to hide the mistakes it makes in socialized government medicine.

If Lois Lerner's hard drive fails conveniently when we're investigating mere targeting by the IRS, imagine what the government will do when it's actually at fault for the deaths of people.

A while ago, Charles Cooke had a great piece in which he warned that, based on Britain's experience with the NHS, the biggest menace of Obamacare was not what the government would do to medicine, but instead what socialized medicine would do to the government.

Because mistakes in delivering health care are catastrophic for those seeking reelection or trying to push an agenda, politicians in Britain spend the vast majority of their time worrying about perceived rather than actual improvement. Government, by definition, has no competition, which means that those who staff it can lie and spin and cover up mistakes not just with impunity but with the full force of the state at their back. Thus do results become less important than statistics, reforms less important than spending, and patients less important than careers. Dishonesty is widespread. Per the Telegraph, the British National Audit Office discovered in 2013 that

one in four hospitals is recording false waiting list times, with patients waiting on average three weeks longer than NHS records show.

Patients groups have said the findings were “scandalous,” and that hospital managers had been able to routinely fiddle figures so they could claim to be hitting Government waiting time targets, when patients were enduring far longer waits for care.

Sound familiar?

posted by Ace at 07:26 PM

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