Obama Wants Wounded War Vets To Pay Medical Costs

H/T Pat Dollard.

CNN:

Senators slam plan for wounded vets to use private insurance

WASHINGTON — Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki confirmed Tuesday that the Obama administration is considering a controversial plan to make veterans pay for treatment of service-related injuries with private insurance.

But the proposal would be “dead on arrival” if it’s sent to Congress, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, said.
Murray used that blunt terminology when she told Shinseki that the idea would not be acceptable and would be rejected if formally proposed. Her remarks came during a hearing before the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs about the 2010 budget.

No official proposal to create such a program has been announced publicly, but veterans groups wrote a pre-emptive letter last week to President Obama voicing their opposition to the idea after hearing the plan was under consideration.

The groups also cited an increase in “third-party collections” estimated in the 2010 budget proposal — something they said could be achieved only if the Veterans Administration started billing for service-related injuries.

Asked about the proposal, Shinseki said it was under “consideration.”

“A final decision hasn’t been made yet,” he said.

Currently, veterans’ private insurance is charged only when they receive health care from the VA for medical issues that are not related to service injuries, like getting the flu.

Charging for service-related injuries would violate “a sacred trust,” Veterans of Foreign Wars spokesman Joe Davis said. Davis said the move would risk private health care for veterans and their families by potentially maxing out benefits paying for costly war injury treatments.

A second senator, North Carolina Republican Richard Burr, said he agreed that the idea should not go forward.

“I think you will give that up” as a revenue stream if it is included in this April’s budget, Burr said.
Murray said she’d already discussed her concerns with the secretary the previous week.

“I believe that veterans with service-connected injuries have already paid by putting their lives on the line,” Murray said in her remarks. “I don’t think we should nickel and dime them for their care.”

Eleven of the most prominent veterans organizations have been lobbying Congress to oppose the idea. In the letter sent last week to the president, the groups warned that the idea “is wholly unacceptable and a total abrogation of our government’s moral and legal responsibility to the men and women who have sacrificed so much.”

The groups included The American Legion, Disabled American Veterans, Military Order of the Purple Heart, Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
At the time, a White House spokesman would neither confirm nor deny the option was being considered.

Flashback:
Pres. Bush increased the VA budget by 56% from 2001 to 2008

Stealth Gun Control Passed With Stimulus Bill

Cross posted from Pat Dollard's.

 

Gun Owners Of America:

The Obama administration is putting a lot of pressure on Congress to slam through the most recent $800+ billion bailout package before anyone has an opportunity to read it.

The Obama administration intones that the details are unimportant. The only thing that matters is the “bigness.” And, by shipping a bill of nearly $900 billion (plus interest) to our children and grandchildren, the package is really, really big –- bigger, in fact, than the budget of our entire government for the first 170 years of our country’s existence.

But now that some of the details are finally starting to leak out of Washington, Gun Owners -– and a lot of other analysts -– are beginning to look at the fine print. And some of it is particularly scary.

Of particular concern to gun owners are sections 13101 through 13434 of HR 1, which would set up the infrastructure to computerize the medical records of ALL AMERICANS in a government-coordinated database.

True, the bill doesn’t mandate that the data will be in a giant computer under the Oval Office. But it does mandate that your medical records be reduced to a computerized form which is available to it in a second.

This it would do by establishing a National Coordinator for Health Information Technology –- tasked with, among other things, “providing information to help guide medical decisions at the time and place of care.”
It should be scary enough that a government bureaucrat is directed by statute to try to influence your doctor’s decisions with respect to your medical care.

But of even greater concern to gun owners is the fact that a government-coordinated database (which government can freely access) will now contain all records of government-provided and private psychiatric treatment -– including, in particular, the drugs which were prescribed.

Remember last year’s “NICS Improvement Act” otherwise known as the Veterans Disarmament Act? This law codified ATF’s attempts to make you a prohibited person on the basis of a government psychiatrist’s finding that you are a “danger” –- without a finding by any court. Well, roughly 150,000 battle-scarred veterans have already been unfairly stripped of their gun rights by the government.

But people who, as kids, were diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder… or seniors with Alzheimer’s… or police with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder… or people who are now theoretically covered by the new law… these people have, generally, not suffered the consequences of its sanctions YET. And the chief reason is that their records are not easily available to the government in a central, easily retrievable, computerized form.

The bailout bill would change all of that. It would push increasingly hard to force your private psychiatrist or government-sanctioned psychiatrist to turn over your psychiatric records to a massive database. This would be mandated immediately if your doctor does business with the government.

This would supposedly save Medicare money in connection with medical treatment. And, the sponsors insist, they would work very hard to protect your privacy.

But this turns the concept of “privacy” on its head. The privacy which is MOST important is privacy from the prying eyes of government –- not privacy of government data against the prying eyes of others. After all, many government data bases have been hacked in recent years, with mountains of information stolen.

So, once the government has access to these computerized psychiatric records, the stage will be set for using that database to take away the gun rights of those with Alzheimer’s, those with ADD, and those with PTSD.