Our healthcare system was never perfect, but lord knows it was better before Barack Obama came in on his high horse and upended everything. According to him, our healthcare system was too expensive and inefficient. His health care plan, Obamacare, would fix everything. Healthcare would be better, affordable, efficient, and affordable.
Did I mention it was supposed to be affordable?
Of course, it didn’t work out that way, as pretty much everyone on the right predicted. Despite being called the Affordable Care Act, it most certainly did not make health care more affordable. Premiums are up, deductibles are up, and coverage is down. Instead of a well-oiled, efficient health care system accessible to all, we got a bureaucratic cluster-you-know-what.
In fact, things are so bad that, according to a new study, "private-sector hospitals, clinics, and insurers are bloated, bureaucratic nightmares compared to efficiently run Veterans Health Administration facilities that put care over profits."
Weird, wasn’t Obamacare supposed to fix all that? And if not the original Obamacare, but the subsequent fixes that came since — the most recent one happening under Joe Biden?
In fairness, the study was conducted by researchers at Hunter College of the City University of New York, Harvard Medical School, the Veterans Health Administration, and the University of Washington. So, how much we can trust the study is, to say the least, debatable. Academia is, of course, loaded with leftists who have agendas, and the Veterans Health Administration certainly has some bias when comparing its own health care system to the pseudo-private sector health care system.
And yet, this study essentially trashed the system that Obamacare gave us.
"The study... points fingers at profit-driven private facilities and insurers, where a whopping 30% of staff are stuck in the tangled web of paperwork, while the VHA shines with a lean 22.5% administrative staff," reports MedicalXPress. "That means nearly 900,000 fewer paper pushers would be needed if private hospitals, clinics, and insurers took a page from the VHA's playbook."
"Most of the bloat comes because profit-seeking insurers try to avoid paying for care by imposing complex rules and documentation requirements," the report continues.
"Our profit-oriented system rewards providers for devoting more resources to gaming the payment system," says the study's lead author, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler.
Now, let's just pause for a moment. As PJ Media reported last month, as of October, the VA backlog hit 300,000 claims again, meaning that the claims have been pending for 125 days or longer. That's scandalously bad, and that number is expected to increase to over 400,000 this year.
This is hardly a new problem, either. During the Obama-Biden administration, the backlog VA reached high, more than doubling during Obama's first term from approximately 390,000 outstanding claims to roughly 884,000 outstanding claims, resulting in thousands of veterans dying while waiting to receive care. It was a national disgrace.
Yet, the VA, we're told, is better than the pseudo-private sector health care system.
Think about that.
