VA Disaster Predicts Obamacare Catastrophe

 Iris Stevens, Letter to the Editor: Single-payer disaster - "It's a slippery slope we're headed down, and it only further solidifies my belief that the Affordable Care Act should have been designed and implemented as a single-payer system. Health decisions should be made by the patient and his or her family and physicians."

This was the remarkable statement toward the end of Waylon Harris's column telling us how tragic the Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision was. Does Mr. Harris even read his own newspaper? Has he not heard about the Veterans Administration scandals? You can't get any closer to a single-payer government health-care system than the VA. Those stories are the real tragedies, the abdication of responsibility toward our national heroes.

While not all VA hospitals are disasters, one former Marine veteran now serving on the organizing committee at Concerned Veterans for America estimates that when all the facts are in, we'll find that hundreds, if not thousands of veterans have died waiting for care from heartless government bureaucrats.

I was able to get a perspective on single-payer systems visiting with patients from several countries while staying with a relative in treatment at a major medical center. Despite their single-payer systems, every patient had come to America to receive treatment they couldn't get in their own country. Some came because they were older than allowed for their particular treatment, some because their needed treatment was not available.

In too many cases, Mr. Harris, their health care decisions were made not by the patient, but by the system. Some of those countries, like Canada and Great Britain, have experienced such problems with their single-payer systems, some mirroring VA problems, that many now purchase private health insurance rather than settle for long wait times and explicit rationing.

I know there'll be those coming out of the woodwork claiming their Aunt Harriet's first cousin once broke her toe in Estonia and received excellent, free emergency medical care. And Mr. Harris might even believe that. But some of us who have been around a little longer than he realize that even with its problems, we have, or did until 2010, the kind of health care system that thousands of people from across the globe come to take advantage of.

With a single-payer system, which is what the president ultimately wants, we'll get a system with the incompetence of the Phoenix VA and the tender loving care of the IRS. Way to go Mr. Harris.
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Iris Stevens is a retired Arkansas teacher of 31 years and concerned American living in Jonesboro, Arkansas.  She often send letters to the editor of her local paper.

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