Discussion for article #223126
This man is fundamentally dishonest. No wonder conservatives love him.
5 Likes
First of all, Obamacare and the VA are two fundamentally different programs. The VA is a single payer system, Obamacare is a market based system.
If Republicans really want to get to the bottom of what’s wrong with the VA, they can start with the fact that they started two stupid wars and then refused to provide adequate funding for a VA system that is predictably being overwhelmed with sick veterans.
Also, Ben Carson is a f***king moron.
9 Likes
Another one for my, “If a Democrat had said that…!” file.
1 Like
Really, Dr. Carson? You regard the suffering and frustration of hundreds of thousands of veterans as a gift from God? Thinly veiled by your concern-trolling, that’s what you’re really saying–yippee, a real scandal, FINALLY! And it is a scandal, but one that is caused in large part by underfunding the Veterans Administration. If you’re going to send people to war to get blown up, you need to fund the care of their broken bodies and minds that are the aftermath.
5 Likes
Bennie was referring to HIS god, CTHULHU.
2 Likes
Did Dr. Carson happen to mention that the old health care system consisted of (for-profit) bureaucracies, who made money for their stockholders by screwing insureds out of health care dollars?
2 Likes
Make the military do what the Rethuglicans made the USPS do"
“Republicans have been pushing schemes to privatize the Postal Service since at least 1996. In 2006 Republicans in the Congress pushed through a requirement that the Postal Service pre-fund 75 years of retiree costs. The Postal Service has to pay now for employees who are not even born yet. No other government agency – and certainly no company – has to do this.”
Excerpted from… http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14467-you-should-be-outraged-by-what-is-being-done-to-our-postal-service
4 Likes
“I think what’s happening with the veterans is a gift from God to show us what happens when you take layers and layers of bureaucracy and place them between the patients and the health care provider…”
Wow. So much concentrated stupidity, it’s difficult to unravel.
First, we can infer this idiot savant with a gift only for neurosurgery believes divine intervention is relevant to health care. But that’s just the silly part.
Second, because public policy is clearly out of the domain of the savant’s gifts, he fails to recognize that the bureaucracy that’s killing people is the one who holds a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, namely the for-profit insurers.
Third, he fancies himself of sufficient intellectual superiority to the average Fox News watcher to divert their attention from the fact that this crisis has arisen strictly because of lack of funding. That lack of funding for actual human beings is against a backdrop of military spending that outpaces the next fifteen nations combined, twelve of whom are on our side.
This isn’t just about the VA hospitals, this is about military families on food stamps, veterans living in mental torment under bridges, and a suicide rate that is tragic.
When Bush rushed us into preemptive war before weapons inspectors could discover he was lying, Rumsfeld told us we had to go with the army (sic) we had, so it was just too bad our troops didn’t have body armor and armored Humvees. As Shinseki then warned us, we needed so many troops for this folly that they co-oped the National Guard. Yet they failed to plan for their return home. It’s a history of neglect and abuse of power, and it’s shameful.
And now, as if they haven’t sacrificed enough, this filthy sonofabitch uses them as political pawns. He seeks to score cheap points with the stupid because his own personal greed might be threatened with further reforms.
This man doesn’t give one good goddamned about veterans. His complaint is that we are on an inexorable path to a health care system for everybody, and he might only be able to buy 50 acres in Tuscany instead of a hundred.
On this Memorial Day, it’s absolutely infuriating.
4 Likes
Dr. Carson has turned out to be such a disappointment for so may African American mothers, he has gone from the black hero surgeon they would talk to their sons about, to a republican…so sad.
3 Likes
It’s not surprising that someone who never bothered to serve his country would feel that making veterans suffer is a gift from yaweh. He misunderstands the fact that the VA is woefully understaffed and that his fellow chickenhawks have failed to adequately fund the system. If you don’t like veterans and don’t want to pay for their benefits, quit send us to war.
4 Likes
Lack of funding has nothing to do with the poor care the VA gives veterans. Government bureaucrats falsified records purely to get bonuses they weren’t entitled to if the truth was known. The money was there, it was just sent in directions other than patient care. Classic example of the perverse incentives inside government bureaucracies. Death panels, doctors working 3 hours a day when backlogs are huge, lazy, good-for-nothing employees that can’t be fired. Dr. Carson is completely correct when he says this points out the inadequacies of government provided health care.
Uncle Ben? Is this the rice guy?
“Thank-you, God, for making our veterans die while waiting for a VA appointment. God is good!”
3 Likes
Read the 4th paragraph, how come this hasn’t been reported? One death is one too many, but if 17 deaths aren’t related to any secret list or long waiting times why do you continually here the press using the the scandal drums using the 40 number as drum sticks?
Those problems vaulted into the national spotlight on April 9, when Miller revealed at a Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing that his panel’s investigators believed as many as 40 veterans might have died while waiting for care. The finding was based on a review of internal records, including an unofficial waiting list of patients.
VA officials denied any wrongdoing but asked the inspector general to investigate. The agency also sent a team of clinical experts to the VA facility in Phoenix to review appointment-scheduling procedures there and possible delays in care.
“We take any allegations about patient care or employee misconduct very seriously,” the VA said in an a statement. “These allegations, if true, are absolutely unacceptable and if the inspector general’s investigation substantiates these claims, VA will take swift and appropriate action.”
Richard Griffin, the department’s acting inspector general, recently told the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee a preliminary review of 17 veterans who died while waiting for appointments at the Phoenix VA hospital found none appeared to have died because of treatment delays.
“It’s one thing to be on a waiting list, and it’s another thing to conclude that as a result of being on the waiting list that’s the cause of death, depending on what your illness might have been at the beginning,” Griffin said.
1 Like
Of course not. This most recent example of Republican opposition to that funding is just a figment of our imagination.
Oh, my, how inconvenient these damned video machines are to the right wing hallucination machine!
2 Likes
Ben Carson understands the Affordable Care Act about as well as he understands evolution, climate science, economics, and the complexities of walking and chewing bubblegum at the same time.
2 Likes
So they’ve been starving the VA since 2003 while two wars that were guaranteed to produce a case load that would overwhelm the system were foisted upon us.
We know what they want.
They want to cripple the agency and privatize the system.
There are obscene profits to be made by looting the treasury to prosecute trumped up wars but why stop there?
Let’s find a way to capitalize on the generated waste at the end of the production line.
It appeals to their sense of efficiency in pursuing the goal of maximizing profits.
If they weren’t hampered by regulations, they’d be looking to extend the process and close the loop when they’ve wrung every dime out of the veterans’ suffering by producing pet food as an end result.
It would take some slick marketing, but I wouldn’t bet against them.
2 Likes
Indeed. I think it’s a little strange to think that a gift from God would take the form of needlessly dead veterans. Stick to neurosurgery, Doc, because this talking-about-stuff thing is not your forte.
3 Likes
Shorter Ben Carson: “I love veterans not getting health care!”
1 Like