Daily Archives: 3 October 2016

The VA Strikes Again

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Reform the Veterans Administration?  It’s still not happening.  It’s hard to believe the folks nominally in charge (they can’t be termed “leadership”) are even trying.

An Illinois Veterans Affairs hospital already under fire for excessive wait times, festering black mold and kitchen cockroaches faces a new shame—the bodies of dead patients left unclaimed in the morgue for up to two months without proper burial, whistleblower documents allege.

One example of the VA’s…failure…here is in this string of emails, beginning 7 Dec 2015, that a whistleblower provided outside authorities.

“[There is] an invoice for an unclaimed veteran that has been here for over 30 days. Please approve for burial at Abraham Lincoln,” the clerk wrote to [Chief of Patient Administrative Services, Christopher] Wirtjes and several others.

Three days later, the clerk wrote again: “Approval of unclaimed Vet D?? Status?”

On Dec 23, the clerk wrote to human resources: “Any further on my poor unclaimed? I WILL file a police report, but I hate doing that…”

Three weeks, and Wirtjes couldn’t even be bothered to respond.

There have been no consequences for Wirtjes, either.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Federal Funding for Medicaid

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Medicaid is a State-run program for providing a measure of medical service for that State’s relatively indigent citizens.  The program is State-run, but it’s jointly funded by the State’s taxpayers and by the nation’s taxpayers via Federal funds transferred to each State for the purpose.  I’ve often written that Federal funds for Medicaid should be ended and that the States should  be allowed to fund and manage their Medicaid programs alone—without Federal funding and associated Federal interference.

Here’s another reason to end Federal funding for a State’s Medicaid program.

US District Judge Kristine Baker issued a preliminary injunction preventing Arkansas from suspending payments to Planned Parenthood for any services to Medicaid patients in the state. Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson last year terminated the organization’s Medicaid contract because of secretly recorded videos made by an anti-abortion group.

Baker also expects that Planned Parenthood would win at trial, hence her injunction.

Unfortunately, the Federal judge is right on the law, if only on 14th Amendment grounds, and on the courts’ Taney-esque position that unborn babies aren’t fully human.

Other than changing that law, though, the way around this sort of thing is that elimination of Federal funds for any State’s Medicaid program.  With that elimination, States that disapprove of Planned Parenthood’s funding of abortions could stop funding Planned Parenthood, and States that approve of easy abortions could continue to do so.