WhatFinger

Still lying, so nothing much has changed.

CNN Reports: Government that wants to run your healthcare STILL running VA with 6 month wait times

By Robert Laurie ——--March 16, 2015

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Before they'd actually managed to ram ObamaCare down our throats, liberals had one pat answer about the federal government’s healthcare competency. "The government runs the VA," they said. "If they can do such a good job caring for our veterans, why wouldn't we want to extend that to everyone?"
Then the VA scandal hit, and that argument evaporated. Suddenly, the VA was no longer the progs' go-to example of federal efficiency. Given how much attention was paid the wait times, phony appointments, and ignored patients, you would think that the feds would have righted their ship. After all, they're still trying to prove that government is capable of running healthcare. With evidence to the contrary piling up like snow in post-global-warming Boston, one would assume they'd be working overtime to make sure things were fixed. Surely, you'll be shocked to find out that isn't happening. According to CNN, improvements have been minimal and new patients can expect to wait anywhere up to a year for an appointment.
Records show on January 15, more than 1,600 veterans who were new patients were waiting 60 to 90 days for appointments. Another 400 veterans have waited up to six months, and 64 veterans had been waiting six months to a year for their appointments. The documents provided to CNN show the lengthy wait times are still happening, within the last several months, and sources say the backlog is happening even now. And yet last month, the VA's acting director for the Western region overseeing the Los Angeles VA told Congress that veterans who are new patients there only have to wait a few days for appointments. "The average wait time for a new patient right now is about four days," Dr. Skye McDougall, the acting director of the Desert Pacific Healthcare Network, Veterans Health Administration, testified before the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs. But McDougall's statement is simply not true.
Still, as we said, there have been some minimal improvements. How minimal? So minimal that you need a microscope to see them. Wait times for doctors have gone from a terrible average of 48 days to an ever-so-slightly less terrible 44 days.
According to the Los Angeles VA's documents dated January 15, the actual average wait time for new patients at the VA was 48 days. A half-dozen medical and administrative sources inside the LA VA system corroborate these waits. The wait times since then have not changed significantly -- coming down slightly to a wait time of 44 days for new patients as of March 1, according to another VA document -- and are still roughly 10 times what McDougall testified they were. The delays in appointments are even taking place at Los Angeles clinics for mental health, where documents show more than 300 veterans have been waiting more than 30, 60, even 90 days for treatment.
So, there you go. It's been a year since the story of systemic, lethal, problems within the VA first broke. Despite public and congressional scrutiny, as well as the Obama administration's alleged "outrage," all they managed to do is shave a few days off of the waiting period. ....And it seems they're still lying to the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs about the improvements they've made. Maybe the liberals were right all along. It's looking like VA management is shaping up to be exactly the right example to use when discussing the promise of ObamaCare.

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Robert Laurie——

Robert Laurie’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain.com

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