yeah, I haven't been out fishing.
So, instead, just think about the VA Healthcare scandal and what awaits for those under Obamacare:
Paul Krugman in 2011 wrote of the VA’s “huge success story”:
Multiple surveys have found the VHA providing better care than most
Americans receive, even as the agency has held cost increases well below
those facing Medicare and private insurers…the VHA is an integrated
system, which provides health care as well as paying for it. So 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.
Krugman added, “Yes, this is ‘socialized medicine’…But it works, and
suggests what it will take to solve the troubles of US health care more
broadly.”
Similarly, Nicholas Kristof of the
Times wrote in 2009:
Take the hospital system run by the Department of Veterans Affairs,
the largest integrated health system in the United States. It is fully
government run, much more “socialized medicine” than is Canadian health
care with its private doctors and hospitals. And the system for veterans
is by all accounts one of the best-performing and most cost-effectiveelements in the American medical establishment.
Just last year, Uwe Reinhardt of Princeton wrote in the pages of the
Times:
Remarkably, Americans of all political stripes have long reserved for
our veterans the purest form of socialized medicine, the vast health
system operated by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (generally
known as the V.A. health system).
If socialized medicine is as bad as so many on this side of the
Atlantic claim, why have both political parties ruling this land deemed
socialized medicine the best health system for military veterans? Or do
they just not care about them?
Or try the
RAND Corporation:
“If other health care providers followed the V.A.’s lead, it would be a
major step toward improving the quality of care across the U.S. health
care system.”
Then there’s Voxsplainer Ezra Klein, who
wrote in the
Washington Post in 2009 that “expanding the Veterans Health Administration to non-veterans” was “one of my favorite ideas.”
Jonathan Golob of
The Seattle Stranger has written in the same
vein: “Every time I read about a Teabagger ranting about how socialized
medicine will destroy this country I think of the VA system. There it
is, a huge and vastly important universal healthcare system—government
run, single payer and therefore
socialist—right here in the brave and privatized United States: The Veterans Affairs hospitals.”