Conix, you post a shit load of assertions on this board that are never linked to supportive facts and evidence. That unfortunate habit marks you as a belief-centric person largely impervious to whatever contradicts your mostly benighted beliefs.
This latest example is particularly egregious because all you had to do was get your key to the Google Machine, insert into machine, turn it on and type 'IS the VA an example of socialism?' or 'why the VA is not socialism'.
You didn't. Why not? Because you fucking knew that you would NOT find what you wanted to find. Instead you've now just read the burn I've inflicted and then, soon after, the even worse burn coped an pasted below.
Any response short of 'opps, my bad, I screwed up again' will be found to be inadequate by everyone who reads it. Good luck.
The VA as an Example of Socialized Medicine in the U.S.
The truth is, the United States already employs several forms of socialized medicine. The Veteran's Administration healthcare system is one example, and in many ways, it is an example of fully socialized medicine.
Veterans can take advantage of the health care offered by the system. The veteran is likely to incur little or no cost for getting care at VA facilities, although this depends on eligibility and income (subject to change).
The VA employs the providers. Physicians work for the VA as either federal employees or on fee basis or contract. The VA runs the facilities, including hospitals, clinics, and long-term care facilities.
The VA health care system is run by the government under the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, a cabinet position appointed by the President and approved by Congress. The budget for the VA is part of the federal budget.
Priorities for how it is spent and what services are provided by the VA are set nationally and subject to political influence. While scandals arise from how the VA provides care, it is a measure of how the VA is accountable to the public, while private health care organizations do not have to be transparent.
The VA Is Socialism in Action. We Must Defend It From Privatization.
The right is hell-bent on dismantling the most progressive agency in government.
On April 18, 1971, nearly 1,000 Vietnam veterans and Gold Star parents descended on Washington, DC, for a six-day protest codenamed “Operation Dewey Canyon III.” The first two Dewey Canyons were secret military offensives into Laos, but for the third, hundreds of people camped on the National Mall in what they called a “limited incursion into the country of Congress.” Events included marching, singing, and guerrilla theater led by the cast of the Broadway musical Hair.
Some veterans headed to the Pentagon to try to turn themselves in as war criminals, while others threw their military medals and battle ribbons onto the steps of the Capitol. Veterans also stormed the Hill with a list of 16 demands, including “immediate legislation to provide proper care and service for all veterans in V.A. hospitals; to make available job training and placement for every returning veteran; and to provide the funds and means necessary for their educational and vocational endeavors.”
If these muscular calls for progressive reform had been issued by anyone other than a rowdy cadre of battle-weary veterans, lawmakers might have scoffed. But the following year Congress passed 14 laws strengthening veteran benefits. They expanded health care and student-assistance eligibility, extended certain VA benefits to widowers, and established life-insurance policies for the severely disabled.
Since the country’s founding, veterans have succeeded in securing promises from the US government. Revolutionary War veterans received the first public pensions in 1818, and veterans’ benefits have accrued slowly but surely ever since. Spearheaded by membership-based veterans’ organizations like the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and Vietnam Veterans of America, grass-roots advocacy and agitation won many of these advances.
In 1977, when lawmakers sought to consign the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee to subcommittee status, veterans’ groups organized a phone-in that jammed the Capitol Hill switchboard. Over the years, many lawmakers have made it a point of personal pride to establish or expand veterans’ programs that alleviate hardship or provide opportunities in education, employment, and small-business development.
As result, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has become a model for progressive ideas in action. Today veterans of all socioeconomic backgrounds are provided comprehensive and high-quality care for free or at low cost. The agency negotiates fair drug prices with pharmaceutical companies; over the last five years, it has cut opioid-prescription rates by 41 percent; and the VA is a national leader in assuring the safety and health of its employees. Physicians for a National Health Program, a universal health-care advocacy group, has pointed to the VA as “ another reason for single payer.”
Veterans overwhelmingly approve of the care they receive in the VA. Dominick Tao, a retired US Army Officer, wrote in The Atlantic that while he first viewed government health care as “oppressive” and “a limit on my freedom,” his experience with the VA taught him “the opposite was true.”
“While any type of universal health-care system would have economic consequences, the associated gains—no longer worrying about coverage loss after a job change, for example, or feeling stressed about finding in-network doctors—for me [these] outweigh that burden,” Tao wrote.
Yet as an invigorated left looks to propose and implement new ideas, few point to the VA as evidence of effective socialist policy. Instead, liberals have ceded rhetorical ground to corporate and right-wing actors hell-bent on destroying the most progressive agency in government. Moreover, once-powerful membership-based veterans organizations are facing diminishing finances and influence, and now must compete against well-heeled corporate and ideological lobbies. In this environment, services have been eroded, and the VA could soon be privatized altogether.
Kristofer Goldsmith, the associate director for policy and government affairs at the Vietnam Veterans of America, noted that as privatization efforts have ramped up: “Suddenly there’s a profit motive for healthcare-related companies and their lobbyists to swoop in try to get a piece of the pie.” Not surprisingly, veterans’ advocates have sometimes struggled to counter the influence of such entrenched interests.
“It’s always going to be an unfair fight. It’s veterans fighting for quality health care versus faceless corporations fighting for dollars,” Goldsmith said.
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