George Rebane
[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast early on 11 June 2014 due to this weekend’s bluegrass festival which will dominate this Friday's air time.]
As the VA healthcare scandal builds, it is putting on exhibit the disaster that Obamacare will deliver to the doorstep of every American. As with so many other big government programs, Obamacare will continue to not deliver on a single promise made during the campaign of lies used to pitch the ignorant. We recall that it was cobbled together by liberal interest groups and finally shoved through Congress in the dead of night with only Democrat support.
Today the VA scandal demonstrates how government bureaucrats are incentivized by bonus policies to toady to their superiors, and victimize the veterans they are paid to serve. The methods used can be understood by any interested citizen, and their use is not limited to the VA. In fact such practices are common throughout all branches of government that systematically separate performance and reward. Yale Emeritus Professor Peter Schutz has studied and reports on such endemic failures of governments in his just published ‘Why Government Fails So Often’.
The current poster child of such failures is the VA in how it has worked its healthcare scam. A study of that massive failure is imperative so that we can recognize it in other government departments, and most importantly see it coming as Obamacare is exposed over the next two or three years.
Here’s how the VA runs and rations its healthcare services. To begin with it operates two ques (I have never liked the idiotic long spelling ‘queue’) – one is the real que with long wait times, and the other is the shortened fake one with handpicked patients that gets reported. VA’s management and many workers are spiffed (or receive bonuses) for not making waves and keeping the politicians in Washington safe. The VA’s annual lump sum budget is about $160B which it allocates internally and runs an organization that employs over 300K government workers. Those numbers are second only to the entire Department of Defense.
The VA is run so poorly that they cannot afford to give enough vouchers to veterans so they can get timely and adequate healthcare in the private sector. That would require restructuring the remainder of the VA, expose decades of mismanagement, and make plenty of waves in Washington. Instead, when death and infection rates began to soar in 2011, the VA simply stopped sending remediation teams to their bad hospitals. Also doing away with those reports kept people inside the Beltway in the dark for another couple of years. (more here)
The crack in the VA’s façade came with last fall’s report of 40 veterans dying while languishing in the hidden patient que of the Phoenix VA hospital. This finally brought attention to the kind of service ailing veterans have been getting for more years than people can count. Following this revelation the investigation has expanded and discovered that the dual waiting lines bamboozle is standard practice in over 70% of the country’s VA hospitals. The scandal has now grown so large that a polarized Congress is finally passing a bipartisan bill that would enforce the issue of such vouchers, and ease the firing of corrupt and incompetent managers. (more here)
Finally, there is an unasked question that I would like to leave with you. Consider that there have been at least 90 VA hospital management teams forwarding fraudulent wait que reports for years, thereby maintaining the rotten status quo. These people knew they were playing with veterans’ lives with these sham reports telling VA headquarters that they were delivering adequate services. All this time none of them had the character or guts to blow the whistle so that something could have been done sooner than later to save the veterans. In order to look good, qualify for bonuses, and cause no ripples in Washington, these civil servants, by the hundreds across the country, treated their patients as if they were cheap potted plants to be shuffled as their careers demanded.
The real question is ‘What kind of people would knowingly perpetrate such suffering and death on fellow Americans, and keep doing it year after year?’. Yet today many still think that a government healthcare program serving 320 million instead of 9 million Americans, managed by the same kind of scumbags, is going to be run more efficiently.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on georgerebane.com where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
rebanesruminations.com 
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