This story actually highlights how inept any kind of health care system run by the government would be:
The government’s sweeping list of promises to make wounded Iraq war veterans whole, at least financially, has not reached this small house in the hills of rural West Virginia, where one vehicle has already been repossessed and the answering machine screens for bill collectors. The Turners have not been making it on an $860-a-month disability check from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
After revelations about the poor treatment of outpatient soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center earlier this year, President Bush appointed a commission to study the care of the nation’s war-wounded. The panel returned with bold recommendations, including the creation of a national cadre of caseworkers and a complete overhaul of the military’s disability system that compensates wounded soldiers.
But so far, little has been done to sort out the mess of bureaucracy or put more money in the hands of newly disabled soldiers who are fending off evictions and foreclosures.
In the Turner house, that leaves an exhausted wife with chipped nail polish to hold up the family’s collapsing world. “Stand Together,” a banner at a local cafe reminds Michelle. But since Troy came back from Iraq in 2003, the burden of war is now hers.
Michelle has spent hundreds of hours at the library researching complicated VA policies and disability regulations. “You need two college degrees to understand any of it,” she says, lacking both. She scavenges information where she can find it. A psychotic Vietnam vet she met in a VA hospital was the one who told her that Troy might be eligible for Social Security benefits.
Of course the MSM being as biased as they are try to spin this into scoring some political points. “See! Look how veterans are treated!”
But in reality this shows how screwed up huge bureaucracies are, and the veteran health care bureaucracy wont even compare to what kind of huge behemoth socialized medicine will be. Macsmind, someone who knows what he is talking about in this regard, has a few points:
I hate the story because as a disable veteran I know how screw up the system can be. I also hate it because the only time you see the MSM covering such a story is when they’re trying to make political points – period.
As some of you know I do public speaking on the side and the area I speak of is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.
I advise people on filing claims for PTSD (which can happen to anyone who experienced a life threating situation), that they are facing an uphill battle. That is true whether or not you are filing it with the VA or the Social Security Administration or even for State Benefits.
~~~
So a detailed diagnosis is difficult. One of the things psychiatrists – the only one qualified to make a diagnosis – will try to ascertain in a diagnosis is whether or not the disability occured specific to duty, or was agravated by duty. Each will award the individual a disability rating, but in the case of agravation by duty the rating will be lower.
In Troy’s case the VA acknowledged his disability yet not at the level that would satisfy. I have three blown out disks caused by service (bad drop), and have a 20 percent rating although I live on pain meds and have a possibility of becoming totally paralyzed in the future due to degeneration of the vertebrae.
There is nothing on the surface wrong with Troy’s award , many get a lot less.
Instead of the MSM acknowledging that huge bureaucracies cause this kind of red tape, including HillaryCare if ever enacted, they instead chose to write a typical BDS type article. It’s all Bush’s fault. Once he’s gone then the bureaucracy will suddenly and magically become a well oiled machine.
Sigh….
See author page
The problem would seem to be the difficulty of sorting out who should and shouldn’t be treated. Treat everyone, and that layer of bureaucracy goes away.
Ah, the loveliness of paperwork! Almost all of the money spent on healthcare these days is not in the spiraling cost of the actual care, but in the spiraling cost of overhead… on the government side we can hear fine words from clueless politicians that decry the paperwork and bureaucracy! And when one is a Senator and claims it can be fixed when they are President, they forget that it is CONGRESS that makes the laws that mandates the paperwork.
This does not get fixed with treating everyone as then *everyone* must be tracked and *everyone* must have their paperwork filled out and *everyone* must be verified and *everyone* must get sign-offs on everything done by regulation. Putting government in the loop makes it worse. Vets would be better off getting their choice of the civilian plans for the Federal government and getting deep breaks on those costs. When government runs things directly… having worked at one of the most efficient agencies in the Federal government, I can say that 65% efficiency is the best you will ever get. Most of the government runs at 45-55% worktime efficiency and some far less than that. In perspective, most private businesses run at 80% efficiency: 80% of worktime is spent doing productive work.
Why folks want the government to run anything but the bare minimum for the Nation is beyond me. Apparently the lesson of the USSR has been forgotten, and being beholden to a bureaucrat is the dream of those that want government to run every blessed thing around. Amazing that I can get one part of the government to put me down as disabled and another part unable to do the same thing…. not worth bothering to try and fix *that* as it would probably, literally, kill me. Never expected anything from Social Security and got just that. But the paperwork that *must* be filled out? You need a specialist for it… actually a few of them.
Just a thought, but a lot of the returning injured vets and their families may not know about the good help that can come their way from the VFW and like organizations. The local VFW service officer may not know all the answers, but they know a lot more the local library, I’d be willing to bet, and if they don’t the national office will.
As a disabled vet I will testify that it is hard to get the benefits you earned. However it is a lot easier now than it was during the Slick Willie regime. They even dropped me from the system in the 90’s because I wasn’t riding the system. A lot of Vietnam vets that had been fighting the system for years have got their benfits since 2001 and there’s been, what, a tripling of the funds available to VA patients by the Bush administration? The VA hospitals are crowded, not by new patients, but by patients that have returned to the system since it became possible to access the earned benefits. Rant and rave and say it isn’t so but I can identify several vets, some from the Korean war, that are now getting medical care and cash benefits that were refused prior to 2001.
I have to apologize to some of the democrats I have called retarded. The democrat leadership of congress have clearified it for me. Democrats aren’t all retarded, all of those under 25 have the mind of a child and are qualified for child medical benefits according to every dimwit on the talk show circuit today. Sorry to have ran down a bunch of mindless democrat, developmentally disabled, children in adult bodies. Hope that clears it up. I’m also happy the dimwits from congress that visited NASCAR the past two weeks got all of their shots. Wouldn’t want them spreading their illnesses (mental) throughout the large crowds. Now tell me these people aren’t crazy.
I think the Americans that have to deal with the Democrat leaders are the ones who really need shots. Rabies could be a real possibility.
JPE has a point…sort of…we all can make this layer of bureaucracy go away come November 2008.
Lots of bureaucracy means one thing. Somebody does not want to give out the money. Why not? Because the military already spends $400 billion a year and Gates has already said even more would have to be spent to buy more equipment and the right equipment (something supposedly past administrations failed to do). Of course Congress members try to support local weapons contractors with sometimes bogus reasoning such as wanting a stealth destroyer for the navy to sneak up on the terrorists and save American lives (something supposedly even the most worthless system is able to do) in the process or ordering a fleet of C-130s the airforce didn’t even want (and later gave to the national guard). Something has to be cut and the system used lots of bureaucracy to keep people from wanting to get the money that was promised.
If the government did want to stress test the system to make it work better, they could have done it when the troops were fighting in WWII, Korea and Vietnam. The reason why Congress doesn’t really care is that weapons contractors provide more money and possibly more votes than the heavly wounded vetrans. This will be used with Hillarycare, because everyone knows that the government will be unable to pay for everyone and either cut corners or fill out so much paperwork the patient dies or gives up before the patient can get help.
Via the Swamp today
The march of the children on the health care veto
by Matthew Brown
And the kids keep coming.
First, there were Graeme and Gemma Frost, the Baltimore children who were hospitalized for months after a 2004 car crash, but who have been seen more recently in the company of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Then came Abby, Josh, Latoya and Kevin, all “vetoed” by President Bush, according to a television advertisement produced this month by liberal groups.
Now meet Bethany Wilkerson, the latest youngster enlisted by congressional Democrats or their allies to help build support for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Having suffered from heart failure as an infant, USAction says, the Florida toddler would not be alive today but for the government-funded program for moderate-income families not poor enough to qualifty for Medicaid.
Now Bethany is scheduled to speak at a Capitol Hill rally Tuesday evening, according to a release this morning by Americans United For Change.
There was no word on what the 2-year-old plans to say. But she joins a flurry of 11th-hour activity in advance of the attempt by House Democrats on Thursday to override Bush’s veto of legislation to expand coverage to 4 million more children at a cost of $35 billion over five years. (A bipartisan majority in the Senate approved the expansion by a veto-proof margin.)
HuffPo, Firedoglake and ThinkProgress and Kos are in a full court press calling out their readers to flood the phone lines of their target lawmakers to force the issue of the vote on Thursday.
It also looks like according to them they are going to drag the Frost kid out for a dog and pony show on CountDown tonight.
Partisanship Gone Crazy
Maybe it’s just me, but I sick and tired of the partisanship gone crazy that has infested this country and shows itself at it’s lowest levels on any given day of late in the blogosphere and in the opinion pages of what some call our news m…