{"id":69146,"date":"2016-11-28T10:10:08","date_gmt":"2016-11-28T15:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=69146"},"modified":"2016-11-28T10:10:08","modified_gmt":"2016-11-28T15:10:08","slug":"obamas-veterans-healthcare-zombie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=69146","title":{"rendered":"Obama’s veterans healthcare zombie"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Military Times<\/a> reports that the Cato Institute Washington think tank “is offering a radical idea” to repair the veterans’ health care system. Force active duty servicemembers and veterans to buy health insurance;<\/p>\n

In an online essay last week, institute Director of Health Policy Studies Michael Cannon recommends dropping the idea of free health care for veterans and instead offering better pay for current troops and vouchers for current veterans to buy their own coverage on the open market. <\/p>\n

He also calls for privatizing the Veterans Health Administration — something the major veterans groups have all argued against — with shares of the new publicly-run company to be given to veterans and servicemembers based on time in service. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The idea is not new. The Obama White House offered the same proposal in 2009 and it was rejected by veterans and Veterans’ Service Organizations. The cost to a service-connected service member would make the insurance not affordable for wounded soldiers who don’t work, generally, because of their injuries. Like the Affordable Health Care Act, the plan depends on insurance companies to disregard the fact that they’ll never again turn a profit in order to make the plan affordable.<\/p>\n

As with many ideas generated in Washington, this one has a social justice warrior component, too;<\/p>\n

\u201c(In the event of war), the added risk of deaths and injuries would cause premiums to rise, which would increase the amount of added pay Congress must provide each service member. The result is that future Congresses and presidents would have to confront this enormous cost of war at the moment they decide to send U.S. troops off to war, and every day they decide to keep them there.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Using service members’ health as a political tool just doesn’t seem right to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Military Times reports that the Cato Institute Washington think tank “is offering a radical idea” … Obama’s veterans healthcare zombie<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=69146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=69146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=69146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=69146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}