'Every American Can Relate' To VA Scandal

by JASmius

Well, now.  It's not taking long for the dot-connecting between VA-gate and the ObamaCare endgame to go viral.

Michael Gerson broke the metaphorical dam on Thursday in the Washington Post:

The more immediate problem for Obama is that the VA scandal comes in the context of a broader health-care debate. The VA health system is unapologetically socialized medicine, in a way that Obamacare (for all its faults) is not. But for the administration, the scandal is an inconvenient public reminder that the centralization of government power in health care has inherent dangers.

The VA scandal is not only the result of weak leadership; it is typical of government-managed systems, which often ration care with waiting lists and lines. The demands on the VA have been increasing, with large numbers of returning veterans, some with complicated injuries, receiving recently expanded benefits. At the same time, the Obama administration has pledged to reduce waiting lists. The results? Alleged double-booking of appointments. Overburdened staff. And the gaming of lists to hide waiting times.

Some liberal economists once referred to the VA system as a model for national health reform. It can’t help the cause of liberalism when the results of rationing, inherent in all government-managed care, are dramatically demonstrated.

If you didn't know better, you'd think Mr. Gerson was a contributor to this blog, wouldn't you?

And now behold the floodwaters carrying the Democrat Party away:

"The VA scandal is different because it is one that every American can relate to," said Democratic pollster and analyst Doug Schoen. "Everyone has a relative who has been a veteran who've put themselves in harm's way to protect this country.

"Every American can relate to the horrific nature of the abuses that are alleged to have gone on at VA hospitals — abuses that have gone on for too long, involving too many people," Schoen said.

That isn't the only reason every American can relate to VA-gate, bub.  The "abuses" are systemic; they're a feature of the VA, not a bug.  And the ubiquitous public outrage isn't just because of the negligent homicide perpetrated against our veterans, but also because Barack Obama and the Democrat Party have successfully done the same to everybody else's health care as well:

Republican Representative Paul Gosar said the scandal pointed to a more fundamental premise. The two-term congressman represents Arizona-4, where reports of at least forty veterans dying while awaiting treatment first surfaced last month.

"It comes down to the mantra of the promises made by this administration," he told Newsmax. "If the greatest of our nation, the men and women who've served to protect our liberties and freedoms, can't get healthcare and can't be taken care of, who can?

"This is what scares everybody," Gosar added, likening the VA to ObamaCare's goal of a massive single-payer healthcare system [i.e. Medicaid]. "Here's one that doesn't work. This is exactly what it looks like."

None of them work.  That's the point.

It's rather like X-Men: Days Of Future Past.  Just as Wolverine was quantum-leaped fifty years into the past to show the younger counterparts of Xavier, Magneto, Mystique, et al the disastrous future their actions would unleash, so the VA scandal has given the public a fresh, real-life warning of the dystopian future of American medicine on which the Unaffordable Care-Less Act has locked us: Americans dying, not by the dozens or even hundreds, but thousands or tens of thousands, waiting for substandard care that never comes, and then being buried on secret lists to hide the institutionalized crime from public view forever, deeper than Magneto's Pentagon cell.  Erased, as though never born, by people possessed of such cynical brutality that they will still stick to the same script: Pick a minor scapegoat, institute an inconsequential reform, claim broad support, then insist, in the classic totalitarian tradition, that the whole matter is "old news".

VA-gate is the second Obama scandal with an American body count, and it's but the harbinger of the tragedy to come from the tyrannical cram-down of ObamaCare.  Everybody can relate to it, everybody can understand it.  And for Obamunists, it is karma.  It is the chickens coming home to roost.  It is the epitome of "what goes around, comes around".

It is the dots, connected.