Obama acts to protect workers from ObamaCare.
...The word that got our attention, though, is dump. It appears in the headline, too: "I.R.S. Bars Employers From Dumping Workers Into Health Exchanges." If the New York Times were our only source of news, we'd be very confused right now. (Well, OK, we'd be very confused almost always.) For months the Times has been touting the quality of ObamaCare policies, scoffing at those who liked their previous plans and were victimized by President Obama's fraudulent promise that they could keep them.
Now all of a sudden the exchanges are a garbage dump? Or is it that the exchanges are a pristine wilderness into which workers are the garbage being dumped?
The Times quotes Obama at a February press conference: "I don't think that an employer-based system is going to be, or should be, replaced anytime soon," he said when a reporter asked "whether over the long term you see a future where health insurance is less tied to the workplace."
You can see why the president would take that position. If employers start dropping medical benefits, the number of people directly victimized by the you-can-keep-your-plan fraud would multiply, and with it Obama and the Democrats' political problems. Thus the administration is in the ironic position of writing regulations to make sure its "comprehensive reform" isn't too comprehensive....
VA Spending Per Patient Exploded Amid Deadly Delays
...The VA's budget has been exploding, even as the number of veterans steadily declines. From 2000 to 2013, outlays nearly tripled, while the population of veterans declined by 4.3 million.
Medical care spending — which consumes about 40% of the VA's budget — has climbed 193% over those years, while the number of patients served by the VA each year went up just 68%, according to data from the VA.
From 2008 to 2012 alone, per-patient spending at the VA climbed 27%. To put that in perspective, per capita health spending nationwide rose just 13% during those years....
Exclusive: Texas VA Run Like a ‘Crime Syndicate,’ Whistleblower Says
...Emails and VA memos obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast provide what is among the most comprehensive accounts yet of how high-level VA hospital employees conspired to game the system. It shows not only how they manipulated hospital wait lists but why—to cover up the weeks and months veterans spent waiting for needed medical care. If those lag times had been revealed, it would have threatened the executives’ bonus pay.
What’s worse, the documents show the wrongdoing going unpunished for years, even after it was repeatedly reported to local and national VA authorities. That indicates a new troubling angle to the VA scandal: that the much touted investigations may be incapable of finding violations that are hiding in plain sight.
“For lack of a better term, you’ve got an organized crime syndicate,” a whistleblower who works in the Texas VA told The Daily Beast. “People up on top are suddenly afraid they may actually be prosecuted and they’re pressuring the little guys down below to cover it all up.”
“I see it in the executives’ eyes,” the whistleblower added. “They are worried.”...
Don’t Nationalize the VA’s Failures
...“Don’t sweat it,” The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber wrote rather bluntly in January, for Obamacare’s “going to get us to a single-payer system before long.” Leading progressive lights Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman certainly hope so — the former having praised the VA as one of “the best health-care systems in the world,” the latter having not only endorsed the principle of a government takeover of the health sector but having advocated the nationalization of hospitals, too. The VA, Krugman claimed in 2011, is “an integrated system, which provides health care as well as paying for it.” As a result, he contended, “it’s free from the perverse incentives created when doctors and hospitals profit from expensive tests and procedures, whether or not those procedures actually make medical sense.”
On paper, this all sounds rather nice, I suppose. But, having lived for 26 years under such a system, I cannot say that I share Krugman’s enthusiasm. Explaining the nature of the new National Health Service in the late 1940s, the British socialist Aneurin Bevan told reporters that “if a bedpan dropped in a hospital corridor, the reverberations should echo in Whitehall.” (“Whitehall” is the part of London in which the national government is located.) Bevan got his way — and how. In England nowadays, when bad things happen to patients, we do not blame hospitals, doctors, and drug companies but politicians and their appointees. Those who follow Parliament are thus treated to the absurd spectacle of the prime minister being asked to comment on individual medical cases in far-flung corners of the nation. This he seems to have accepted as his role. Never does he say in response, “Why am I being asked about this?” Never does he ask whether it might be better if the state got out of the hospital business. Instead, in each and every instance, he takes responsibility and promises to look into it.
Does he do so? Rarely. 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....
...All of which is to say that this is not only a question of what government does to health care but of what health care does to government. As Patrick Brennan noted yesterday, the sorts of problems that we are seeing at the VA — “gaming statistics, secret waiting lists, long wait times for serious procedures” — “seem to be endemic to single-payer health systems and especially fully socialized ones (as in ones where the government employs the doctors and runs the hospitals, too, like the VA, Britain’s, and Spain’s).” In short: Governments can’t run health-care systems efficiently, which irritates people, which leads to governments lying about health care. It’s a mess...
VA Spending Per Patient Exploded Amid Deadly Delays
...The VA's budget has been exploding, even as the number of veterans steadily declines. From 2000 to 2013, outlays nearly tripled, while the population of veterans declined by 4.3 million.
Medical care spending — which consumes about 40% of the VA's budget — has climbed 193% over those years, while the number of patients served by the VA each year went up just 68%, according to data from the VA.
From 2008 to 2012 alone, per-patient spending at the VA climbed 27%. To put that in perspective, per capita health spending nationwide rose just 13% during those years....
