Subscribe Today!
Networked Blogs
Dec
10
The New York Times reports that “more and more” people are dying or filing for bankruptcy protection while waiting to be approved for Social Security Disability benefits. Could a national health care system do any better than the national health care systems already being run by the government?
Steadily lengthening delays in the resolution of Social Security disability claims have left hundreds of thousands of people in a kind of purgatory, now waiting as long as three years for a decision.
Two-thirds of those who appeal an initial rejection eventually win their cases.
But in the meantime, more and more people have lost their homes, declared bankruptcy or even died while awaiting an appeals hearing, say lawyers representing claimants and officials of the Social Security Administration, which administers disability benefits for those judged unable to work or who face terminal illness.
The Veterans Administration government health care system doesn’t serve its beneficiaries any better, according to a Washington Post report:
While the hospital is a place of scrubbed-down order and daily miracles, with medical advances saving more soldiers than ever, the outpatients in the Other Walter Reed encounter a messy bureaucratic battlefield nearly as chaotic as the real battlefields they faced overseas.
On the worst days, soldiers say they feel like they are living a chapter of “Catch-22.” The wounded manage other wounded. Soldiers dealing with psychological disorders of their own have been put in charge of others at risk of suicide. …
“We’ve done our duty. We fought the war. We came home wounded. Fine. But whoever the people are back here who are supposed to give us the easy transition should be doing it,” said Marine Sgt. Ryan Groves, 26, an amputee who lived at Walter Reed for 16 months. “We don’t know what to do. The people who are supposed to know don’t have the answers. It’s a nonstop process of stalling.”
If the government cannot take care of veterans in its government-run VA healthcare system and it cannot figure out how to approve disabled people for health care benefits before they die or are financially ruined, what will happen when they require everyone to send in their application for national health care?
Government run health care is a great idea on paper, but when it has been put into practice, it often ends up being a bureaucratic nightmare where everyone is rejected and long waits are common.
Can any of the candidates promising Americans national health care promise that the government system they propose won’t be like the government health care systems that currently fail to serve the disabled and our nation’s veterans?
