Fruity Tangentialness

Well Friends, ol’ Lars is fired up! He Who Must Not Be Named and his faithful sidekick Shinseki (nka Wormtail) want private health insurance programs to pay for treatment provided by the VA for service-connected medical conditions.

This is outrageous!

The VA already bills “Third party” payors (i.e. private health insurance) millions of dollars a year that they shouldn’t. Most notably in that amount is charges to private insurance for prescription medication that is supposed to be paid for by the VA. Veterans exposed to ionizing radiation and environmental contaminants while in-service are supposed to receive free medication for conditions that may be related to those exposures. Problem is, nobody in VA or the third party payors knows that. So the VA bills these insurance companies millions every year and they just keep on paying. Primarily because they don’t want to get in trouble with The Gubmint.

Why should you care?

Hang on, Lars’ll tell ya. You should care because those insurance companies are passing that cost on to you!

Whenever the VA bills the insurance company, the insurance company turns right around and increases your premiums. The end result is that you are paying for what the VA (gubmint) should be paying for. Very few people believe that they don’t pay enough taxes, and it is the taxes that we pay that should be funding our defense costs. Included in those defense costs should be gubmint funded health care for people who were injured in-service (service- connected conditions).

Congress enables VA to continue this practice by way of the Medical Care Cost Recovery Program (MCCR). The VA is giddy about the program because they can spend the money they collect any way they want to. Therefore, by expanding the program to include charging private insurance companies for service-connected conditions, they can increase the collections at least ten-fold. They can then use that money to buy fine leather portfolios, and pay big fat bonuses, for the chronic underperformers at the highest echelons of the bloated bureaucracy.

This isn’t the CHANGE we were promised friends. This is more of the same, only worse. This is a step in the wrong direction and unless something drastic is done they are going to get away with it.

Now is the time to STOP THE MADNESS! Tell congress NO. Tell the Administration NO. Tell them that it is the responsibility of government, not the private sector, to bear the cost burden of providing health care to Veterans who were injured in-service.