VA Government Union Fought Against Allowing Vets into Private Care

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It’s the familiar old story of socialized medicine.

On the top executives keep cutting costs. On the bottom, health care unions keep increasing benefits for workers. In the middle, the patients get squeezed out.

Unlike the unions, a patient has no negotiating leverage with government medicine. So the workers get more benefits and the patients get fewer medications and procedures. And quicker pathways to death so they don’t use up any of the money that would otherwise go to executive bonuses and union benefits.

You can see it in the NHS or the VA. It’s all the same. (via Iowntheworld.com)

Encouraging vets on Medicare to use civilian care instead of the VA could cut the patient backlog at the VA by as much as half, solving a national crisis.

Almost half of vets are 65 or over, and nearly all vets using the VA have Medicare coverage.

Often, they’d be better off getting their bypass surgery and cancer operations at civilian hospitals that do higher volumes of these age-related procedures and have better survival rates, instead of sticking with the VA.

But the VA fails to tell them. The culprit is the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the union that dominates the VA. For AFGE, the VA is a jobs program.

It’s a structural problem. Government unions are obsessed with maintaining the system that employs them while pretending that it’s being done for the public. You can swap in any teachers’ union insisting that the public school system is for the kids.

Instead of for them.

Nine months ago, the VA rolled out a $9.3 billion program to refer vets needing specialists to civilian medical centers if the wait at their VA was too long or they lived too far away.

AFGE is fighting the program, even accusing VA executives of deliberately causing the backlog.

“Create a Crisis and then outsource the work. They will dismantle the VA Healthcare System a brick at a time,” charges the union’s newsletter.

It’s virtually the same rhetoric with the NHS in the UK. The unions cover up any problems and when they’re exposed, they insist that it’s a conspiracy to privatize health care. Which, unlike starving patients to death, would be a terrible thing.

Because then Ahmed and Lucy might face some actual accountability.

Vets could be issued a special Medicare card that eliminates the Part B premium and reduces Part B copays and deductibles to the small fees the VA charges

That would be a relatively simple solution. It would reduce the backlog and route patients who don’t need to go to the VA out and refocus the VA on treating problems that are more common in veterans.

But that would take them out of the jurisdiction of AFGE and into the jurisdiction of the SEIU and your local unfriendly nurses’ unions and they only get along when supporting Democrats.

  • TopAssistant

    If any politician, including presidents, want to fix any challenge in an agency, department or program they must first abolish the union. As a former union president I can honestly say the union is supervisors and managers BIGGEST obstacle.

  • BS77

    As I heard on the radio yesterday, an advocate for our Vets: Give the Vets vouchers and let them go to their choice of hospital, doctor etc for the care they need. The VA hospitals are inefficent..loaded with administrators and lifer bureaucrats who are after the over time pay etc etc

  • glpage

    No federal agency should get any funding until the veterans get what they deserve.

  • pupsncats

    Behind every problem within the federal government is a union. There are myriads of them and their sole purpose is to benefit the bosses first, Democrats second, and keep the flames of agitation burning by pitting management against employee.
    Our poor veterans have suffered under Obamacare I for a long time and this latest revelation about how they are dying and how waiting lists are being falsified among others things is a preview of Obamacare for us all.