Best Healthcare System Ever.

Posted on 11/11/2009 at 8:03 am by Bob Cesca

This is disgraceful:

According to a study released by the Harvard Medical School, 2,266 veterans under the age of 65 died last year as a result of not having health insurance. Researchers emphasize that “that figure is more than 14 times the number of deaths (155) suffered by U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2008, and more than twice as many as have died (911 as of Oct. 31) since the war began in 2001.”

There’s no excuse for this. Or maybe there is — courtesy of Frank Luntz. We can’t have a “government takeover” of healthcare, so whatever!

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  • BenR

    Why do the Republicans hate veterans?

  • Jan

    I always thought all vets had coverage from the VA for the rest of their lives after they served.Am I mis informed?

  • http://www.osborneink.com Matt Osborne

    Jan, my VA card can get me emergency treatment and transportation to the nearest VA clinic in the event of a catastrophe. But too many vets don’t live near a clinic and lack private insurance. For one thing, almost everyone comes out of the military with a preexisting condition — that’s MY problem in a nutshell. Service is brutal. There’s a reason why every forty-year old retiree you meet looks about 60.BenR, it’s no joke. The GOP has always wanted to disestablish the VA. Bush cut back on the number of claims processors just as tens of thousands of new injuries were coming into the system; there’s now a huge backlog of claims. I was on a telephone town hall with my rep last week in which he said there are now several members of his staff who deal with VA claims problems FULL TIME.If you HATED veterans — actually wanted them to DIE — you could not do worse to us than was done 2001-2009.

  • Eric

    Thanks for posting that, Matt – I learned something new.Why does the GOP take that position? It doesn’t seem to fit with their ideology, to the extent that I understand it.

  • http://www.osborneink.com Matt Osborne

    Eric, the VA is your classic government agency: established by Democrats, underfunded by Republicans.

  • J M Ashby

    Eric – It doesn’t fit their ideology? Can one even say what the GOP ideology is now days? They lost me a long time ago. They preach one thing and do another. Their “ideology” changes depending on the direction of the wind or the circumstances of the argument.

  • Eric

    @J M Ashby – yeah, I see your point.

  • Allen Frederick

    Remember that Republicans don’t care whatsoever about members of our military, current or veterans. Not one bit. Republicans only care about them as far as they can exploit them to win elections or pass legislation to transfer wealth to the rich benefactors in the military industrial complex.Where’s my proof?1. There are so many chickenhawk Republicans they’re too numerous to name in one post. It takes a site: http://www.awolbush.com/whoserved.html2. Recall Henry Kissinger said military men are “dumb, stupid animals to be used” as pawns for foreign policy.

  • brutlyhonest

    The only ones with full coverage for life are retirees – and that’s through the DoD program TRICARE.

    To use the VA system, a veteran has to prove the medical condition is service related. This isn’t as simple as it may sound. If you don’t get the injury/condition documented in your medical record while on active duty, it didn’t happen there. Of course, most folks don’t go the doctor for everything they should and don’t find out until after they are out. Service organizations like AMVETS are going to mandatory pre-separation seminars and helping get the word out, but many folks (especially junior ones) still get rushed out the door without getting the paperwork done.Donald Rumsfeld once said that the only people who make the military a career are those who can’t make it on the outside. I used that as a conversation starter in a Naval War College class back in the summer of 2001 – remember when the buzz was about how he was wrong for SecDef because all he wanted to do was cut force levels (troops are expensive) and replace them with technology (provided by his buds in the government subsidized defense industry).

    I can no longer find that quote – it seemed to disappear in the post-9/11, Rumsfeld is a brilliant war planner (or at least was until his personally mandated maximum troop level for the Iraq invasion imploded on him – and us).

    I’ve been futilely trying to get people to pay attention and realize that the r’s talk a good game, but they are generally NOT pro-military. They are pro-defense industry. The two aren’t the same thing.

  • veralynn

    I don’t remember that brutly, but it sounds like rumsfeld. It has always amazed me that the repubs get the admiration and support of the military and veterans, yet they get royally screwed every time by them.