Bernie Sanders piles on hypocrisy over health care
The socialistically inspired Sen. Bernie Sanders is still running for president, not the kind who gives an inaugural speech and sits in the Oval Office, but the kind who manipulates the person behind the desk, doing anything that works for the sake of poison policies.
Sanders has already received some concessions from Joe Biden, the confused Democratic candidate for the high office, and, among other techniques, Sanders is boosting his candidacy with a weapon often employed by President Trump: Twitter. Sanders has employed it against Trump, seeing a special advantage when Trump suffered a COVID-19 infection.
“Mr. President: You attack ‘socialized medicine’ every single day,” he tweeted to this emblem of leftist disgust. “Well, let’s be clear. The excellent care you received at Walter Reed was at a 100% government-funded, government-run hospital. For Trump, ‘socialized medicine’ is bad for everyone but himself. Total hypocrisy!”
Sorry, but the hypocrisy resides with Sanders. Yes, Walter Reed is an outstanding VA hospital, but Sanders was chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee when veterans were dying in large numbers because of malfunctioning VA hospitals all over the country. He did nothing much about it. Trump pretty much fixed things.
The problem was that many VA hospitals apparently did not have the management talent or means in equipment, beds or health practitioners to treat all qualified patients at the same time and, by way of endangering lives, instead put many on waiting lists longer than law allowed. With criminal investigations to come, many hospital employees were engaged in hiding the waiting-list data apparently to keep getting bonuses for doing a good job.
But it’s reported that Sanders had more than hints about the situation when 18 inspector general reports came his way, and still could not rise above just seven committee meetings in a year while the Republican House’s VA committee had 45. Ah, but then, in 2014, the media discovered how a Phoenix VA hospital had a long waiting list that turned out to be between 1,400 and 1,600 veterans out there for as long as almost two years while 40 died. Reporters knocked on more doors and discovered more tragedies, awakening the public to the crisis.
Sanders thought all of this was just a conservative plot to get rid the Department of Veteran Affairs, especially when a widely proffered solution was allowing the waiting-list victims to get VA support in going to private hospitals. It just didn’t seem possible to him that private hospitals could perform better than government hospitals. He did push an unaffordable spending bill that got nowhere and then brought spending down about $5 billion or so and said his committee would accept legislation in which waiting-list veterans could get highly restricted, complicated access to private care.
This compromise, which became law under the Obama administration, didn’t accomplish much, with just 283,000 being told they could go to private facilities and only half of them making it there in the first 11 months. After Trump was elected, he helped get a less encumbered measure passed that made more veterans eligible for far more private care with 2.4 million veterans getting treatment in the first 15 months.
Think about all of this for a minute. In his tweet, Sanders somehow seemed to think he was making a big point about the special treatment Trump got when any president would have received the same treatment. He in effect said that big government always does things especially well when that is often not the case. He thinks private enterprise solutions are bogus. He seems to believe that because Walter Reed is a good hospital that we can therefore learn from it about socialist wonders when a far better example would be Venezuela.
Joe Biden is not Bernie Sanders but the far left is becoming a significant force in the Democratic Party with all kinds of frightening ideas out to get us.