By Jonathan LaForce
Wednesday, August 16, 2017
People keep talking about single-payer health care and
universal health care as if somehow such systems are spontaneously going to
save all of humankind from some sort of dreaded mass bodily failure. Guess
what? The alarmists are full of crap. It’s nothing but lies. How does Jon know?
What possible knowledge could Jon possess about health care? Go ahead. Ask.
Veterans Affairs. It was founded specifically to handle
men (and women) who joined the uniformed services of these United States,
signed a blank check made payable for an amount up to and including their
lives, then to do its very best to fulfill what they raised their right hand
and swore an oath to perform, regardless of that cost.
The VA is expected to “to fulfill President Lincoln’s
promise “To care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow,
and his orphan” by serving and honoring the men and women who are America’s
Veterans.” They are expected to do it without regard for race, sex, sexual
preference, religious creed, or origin. And they routinely fail—miserably.
Veterans Kill
Themselves Over Rationed Care
It’s not hard to find their failures. On May 12, 2015, in
Phoenix, Arizona, a veteran seeking help was turned away from the local clinic.
He walked out to his truck, turned a gun on himself, and blew his brains out.
On 4 May 2016, a young soldier the VA refused to admit for psychiatric help did
the exact same thing. On 24 March 2016, a 51-year-old vet in New Jersey tried
to obtain help at the local VA clinic, was refused, and did the only thing he
felt he had left to do: he doused himself in gasoline in front of the clinic,
lit himself on fire, and died.
Within the last two years, we’ve seen reports of vets who
threw themselves out the upper windows of VA hospitals because some moronic
bureaucrat decided these men were “all better now and didn’t need or deserve
further help.” The bureaucrats wouldn’t listen, and these people felt they had
nowhere else to go.
We talk about the 22 veterans a day who are said to
commit suicide. That’s what it looks like! There’s a reason for line about
having “A second chance to die for your country.” Even among non-lethal events,
it’s enough to make me unhappy. We have ancient men, well into their 70s, who
spend hours waiting on needed medication at VA facilities and wind
up sleeping on the floor with bags of pill bottles for their pillows. How
the h-ll does this happen? Is this the kind of health care Americans really
want for everyone?
Single-payer health care is defined as a system in which
the government, financed by taxes, covers basic health costs for all residents
regardless of income, occupation, or health status. The VA is such a system.
Its budget is (FY 2018) $186.5 billion.
The last census I can find, dated May 2014, lists 8.92
million people enrolled in the VA health care system, for which the budget then
was $150.7 billion. It includes 350 hospitals and 820 clinics. It really makes
you wonder: Why, in the most technologically capable, productive, first-world
country on the planet, do we have great-grandfathers who sacrificed for their
country sleeping on cold linoleum waiting to see doctors and get real treatment?
Why is committing suicide preferable to waiting for help to come?
Welcome to
Single-Payer, Folks
I’ll leave you to ponder that while I explain some more
facts of life. In addition to medical care, the VA also provides compensation
and pension for those who are injured in service. You go in, speak with a
veteran services’ officer, present your medical records, file for the injuries
(while continuing to lack treatment), and then you wait.
Why wait? What are we waiting for? Good question. First,
the electronic paperwork has to move through a labyrinthian process of review,
after which you get a letter telling you the VA has now received the paperwork
you filed a month or more prior and somebody will be getting in touch with you
to determine what’s next. A couple months will pass (if you’re lucky), after
which you will receive a phone call telling you that appointments have been
scheduled for examination. You must make those appointments or you cannot
receive a rating.
Notice what’s missing? If you said a human being to check
if this exam is compatible with your schedule, you’d be correct. The
appointments are filed without any input or knowledge on your part. You’ve got
work and can’t make it? Tough luck, Joe. You’re a single parent and don’t have
anybody to watch your kids so you can make your appointment? Too bad. Guess
you’ll have to do without.
Nor can you go into a local doctor with forms for them to
fill out and mail to the VA. These are third-party contractors the VA has hired
as “impartial judges.” They do nothing more than diagnose what’s wrong, and how
severe. To limit who can handle these things, the medical reviewer has to be
certified by the VA. So we have the people paying your bills deciding whether
you need care. Please tell me how that’s supposed to be trustworthy.
After your visit finally occurs, the paperwork is routed
to a VA rater, who reviews it and makes a determination about your case. A
faceless, unnamed, unelected bureaucrat is supposed to make an intelligent
decision about the future and condition of someone he or she has never met, let
alone examined. If, for whatever reason, the rater decides this person really
doesn’t need or deserve a high rating, the veteran will receive “not service
connected” or “0% rating.” And the appeal system if you disagree with that
decision is lengthy.
In Los Angeles County, the average time to complete a
claim is three years. Not three weeks, not three months, but 36 months. During
that time you may or may not be fit to actually work, nor receive the care you
need. Now do we start to see why there might be a problem?
War Ruined My
Body, and the VA Is Making It Worse
When I came home from Afghanistan, I noticed my hearing
was problematic, to the point that unless someone was speaking with sufficient
volume, I could not make sense of what he said. But every ear exam came back as
“You’re good, LaForce, nothing’s wrong with you.”
This kept happening from November 2011 all the way to
December 2016, when I told an audiologist in the St. George Clinic “I ain’t
crazy, I can’t hear. Great, you keep giving me the tone tests, I keep passing.
But when I’m in a classroom, when I’m at home, when I’m anywhere and awake, the
whole of humanity sounds like the teacher from Charlie Brown. Unless they are
in my face with the volume of Drill Instructor Sergeant Fischer, I cannot
understand them! You’re the guy who knows ears and hearing. Figure it out.”
The audiologist called a speech pathologist 360 miles
away in Salt Lake City and scheduled an appointment. Two months out was the
soonest I could get in to see her. For the record, in the entire state of Utah,
there are maybe two speech pathologists directly employed by the VA who work in
the Salt Lake City facility.
After undergoing a series of tests and three separate
trips to SLC, the pathologist finally figured out what so many had missed: I
had a traumatic brain injury. Somewhere along the way, I had gained one
sufficient to scramble the nerves between my ear and brain so I could no longer
properly process what I heard at a certain volume level. It’s so bad that on
the bell curve, I’m in the 61st percentile, and show signs of gradually getting
worse.
The diagnosis occurred in April. I amended a claim filed
in February to include it. Take a guess what we learned in July, three months
later: according to my paperwork, the VA rater only bothered to check my
medical record in February when the original claim was filed, then stopped.
I’m Still Waiting
to Get Care, Four Years Later
Today, I received information that somehow, an injury
that has plagued me since boot camp on through my time in the fleet and since
somehow magically improved in February. I will now have to file an appeal for
this. Meanwhile, I still cannot work a regular job. No sitting for long period,
no standing for long periods. No lifting over 20 pounds. No squats. Nothing. I
have to be flat on my back in order to not feel pain, and even that can only
last so long. When your wife and two toddlers become ill, they either suffer,
or you choke down Motrin and stumble around doing what you can to help ease
their problems.
What about physical therapy? The VA only authorizes six
appointments at a stretch, after which the physical therapist has to call and
get more appointments authorized. That will happen only if the VA ever bothers
to pick up the phone and call them back. I’ve been waiting since February for
that, and I have my doubts. Not that the VA cares. You had physical therapy!
You must be better now!
Show me how six appointments over three weeks is
magically supposed to make years of damage disappear. I had to leave the
service over these injuries. I still can’t run, four years after having left
active duty and no longer pounding my body into submission to maintain good
physical condition. I was running as much as 66 miles per week, most of it on
my own time, to stay in good shape. If you held a gun to my head now, I could
maybe do a quarter-mile before my back gave out on me, and then I’d tell you to
pull the trigger.
Because the VA controls the means of communication,
because there is no means of accountability over decision making, and we
veterans are forced to undergo this in silence for fear of retaliation, it
continues. I have no means of recourse beyond what I’ve outlined. It is
frustration and aggravation to the extreme. But we’re supposed to just live
with it. Hooray for single-payer.
Nobody Wants More
Of This, Trust Me
To some degree, I do just endure it. I get good care at
my local VA clinic, and the doctor has done what he can for me. I endure
because the compensation and pension I receive is enough to keep my family off
the street. But something has got to change. A man cannot live on pain pills
alone. Either cure him or kill him, because hanging out in limbo is not living.
It is simply suffering. And that ain’t right.
In a better world, the VA would operate fewer hospitals
and spend the bulk of its slimmed-down budget enabling veterans to seek private
care through vouchers or a similar system, and there would be no trouble
getting those vouchers accepted because the VA paid on time (if you think that
isn’t a problem, you’re nuts). I could go to my local, private hospital here in
St. George if I needed surgery, seek out and obtain physical therapy from a
trained private professional, create a plan that addresses my issues, and
through several months of sound medical care become sufficiently well that I no
longer received VA compensation for it.
Why? Because I was healed. Made whole. Not drugged up to
the gills and screwed over. In a better world, I’d be pursuing a commission
from the Marines upon my graduation from college with a bachelor’s. I would be
able to work a full-time job right now that took care of my family so we
weren’t living month-to-month.
When all we are is a rising cost to be pruned by
bureaucrats, those who control the system will be our overlords. Go take a look
at how many times VA personnel were charged for misconduct and misbehavior,
then let off without reprimand, or worse promoted to a new billet in a
different region to cover up the misconduct!
Whistleblowers charge Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a former
assistant secretary at the VA, tried to retaliate against them for going public
with veteran abuse. We’ve seen more people fired from the VA, or placed on
suspension pending review and firing, since Inauguration Day 2017 than we have
in the prior eight years of the Obama administration combined.
If you want long waits, even inside the doctor’s office,
months before actually seeing a doctor about pressing issues, if you want
faceless bureaucrats determining your life, if you truly in your heart of
hearts think that somehow this is healthy and good, you go right on ahead. If
you want to see more babies wind up like Charlie Gard, you go right on ahead
and do that damnably awful thing.
I want a better world. But the only way I can have that
is to make it for myself. Because the system is failing those who need it. And
I’m tired of suffering. I’m tired of the pain. My wife needs better. My
children deserve better. The American people deserve better.
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