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VA Government Union Fought Against Allowing Vets into Private Care

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On May 29, 2014 @ 10:31 am In The Point | 4 Comments

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.


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