VA is Everyone’s Hospital Experience After Obamacare

VA Scandal and Your Next Hospital Visit

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “There’s a story about these atrocities that are being discovered — we talked about this in the last hour of yesterday’s show — at these VA hospitals, especially the one in Phoenix and all the things that are occurring here.  Folks, this should not come as a surprise.  I’m surprised that people are surprised.  That doesn’t mean that you have to accept it or that you should drop your revulsion to it.  But please, surprise?  This is government we’re talking about here.  Check that, not only is it government, it’s federal government.  If there’s a larger perpetrator of nincompoopery that’s not the federal leviathan, I’d like to know who it is.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  There’s a story about these atrocities that are being discovered — we talked about this in the last hour of yesterday’s show — at these VA hospitals, especially the one in Phoenix and all the things that are occurring here.  Folks, this should not come as a surprise.  I’m surprised that people are surprised.

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That doesn’t mean that you have to accept it or that you should drop your revulsion to it.  But please, surprise?  This is government we’re talking about here.  Check that, not only is it government, it’s federal government.  If there’s a larger perpetrator of nincompoopery that’s not the federal leviathan, I’d like to know who it is.  Who would that be?
In any event, I was reading some of the stories that have made their way into press and into the media, and reading other people’s hissy fits and temper tantrums over it.  Just imagine that these kinds of atrocities are going to occur with increasing regularity.  The way the VA is being run is the way that hospitals that cave into and become whole partners with Obamacare, that’s the way they’re going to be run.  You vets, again, are first among your countrymen again.  You’re suffering, and I don’t think you should, a slight against your health and your character at the hands of government bureaucrats and bureaucracy.  You get to sample it and you have been sampling it before the rest of us are forced into it.  Remember the story we did on Monday?  If you’re holding out hope that this Obamacare monstrosity is not going to totally change the way most medical services are delivered, remember the story we did here on Monday about the John Hancock Insurance Company.  I read you the release:

[reading]

Registered representatives at Signature Investors Inc., John Hancock’s broker-dealer, received some dismaying news on Tuesday: The firm will be terminating its health and insurance benefits and will freeze its retirement benefits plan at the end of the year.

[end reading]

Mike:  Folks, not only are many of us — I suspect I’m probably in this number as well — going to see any form of company-based or company-subsidized health insurance.  Not only is that going to come to a complete end thanks to the Affordable Care Act or thanks to Obamacare.  The “retirement system” is next.  Many of you have been fearing this for years, that when the government needs a couple trillion bucks to bail itself out, where can they get a couple trillion short of telling Janet Yellen to go print it off at the Federal Reserve?  They could raid 401k’s, couldn’t they?  There was a professor at the University of New Jersey that actually proposed this in a congressional hearing in 2009, which alarmed many people to the point where they went: Excuse me?  You’re going to do what?  Before anything could even be proposed, it was nipped in the bud.  Well, maybe they told you they nipped it in the bud.  Listen to the John Hancock story.

[reading]

Effective Jan. 1, 2015, the firm will change its compensation structure “to one more representative of those commonly offered in the industry as a whole,” according to an e-mail confirmation from Melissa Berczuk, a spokeswoman for John Hancock Financial Services Inc.

Signator has been migrating from a pure career agency to a model that’s more based on that of an independent broker-dealer, Ms. Berczuk said.

John Hancock in 2009 overhauled its business model to give its career reps the option of going independent…

The new notices to reps and employees, obtained by InvestmentNews, include a breakdown of options for health and insurance benefits once the plan terminates at the end of the year.

Signator suggests that reps and staffers look into the public insurance exchanges, as well as health coverage bought through a private channel such as an insurance agent.

[end reading]

Mike:  You have an insurance company, John Hancock Insurance Company, that is now no longer going to subsidize, as a part of the compensation package, the health insurance costs for employees.  Okay, fine.  Remember, we’re talking a major corporation here, Fortune 500 company.  They’re going to suggest that while they — and I know they don’t sell health insurance as one of their — I don’t know, maybe they do.  To my knowledge, they don’t.  They’re in the insurance industry.  They’re going to suggest that the first place their employees who they were formerly insuring look for the missing insurance is government.  Go to the public exchange.  Why would you suggest — if you’re competing in a market and you’re competing for the insurance dollars or whatever the industry may be, when that market begins to change, why would anyone suggest that you go to the State and utilize the power of the State to fill the gap or make up the difference in the insurance coverage you’re no longer going to offer?

Let me tell you something else.  Think about this.  I’ve always contended this amidst much pushback from some of you, that what are known as or called benefits at larger companies that offer benefits as part of your compensation, that if you actually ran the numbers and considered that you could purchase — if we were talking about — remember, we’re not talking about a world in which we live in subsidized bliss.  We’re talking about where we don’t live in subsidized bliss and we actually have to provide for ourselves things like auto insurance, if you want it, liability insurance on your house, if you want it, health insurance or major medical insurance, if you want it.  If you want to provide a nest egg of sorts so you can stop working before you actually die, all these things would be your responsibility, and they should be your responsibility.  Of course, the State has taken over most of them, or pretends to manage them, manage them poorly is what we should say.

So as part of your compensation, you were offered these “benefits.”  Now that they’re not offering benefits or these “benefits,” are they now going to fork over the difference to the employee?  If you work for a big company — I bet there are people listening right now that can vouch for this.  If you work for a major corporation, a Fortune 500 corporation that has full-boat “benefits,” these benefits may exceed $10,000, $15,000, sometimes $20,000 per year that you’re not directly paid so that you can go out and procure those benefits for yourself.  You don’t have to do it.  The company has done it for you.  Now that they’re going to streamline these or begin to stop offering them, are they simultaneously going to start increasing people’s wages?  That would make sense for the employee, but not a lot of sense for the employer.  The employer can just say: Well, we never really calculated it like.  Oh, yes, they did.  As a matter of fact, here’s how they calculated it: We can offer employees these “benefits” that will actually only cost us X, but the employee thinks it costs us Y (which is a lot more than it actually did), so we’re actually getting more labor out of these people for less money.

That’s why, all things being considered, one of the functions of the market that was eliminated by the introduction of health insurance way back in the day — this is what began the process of taking the financial incentive and the prices mechanism out of the pricing for medical services — was that employers paid the bills and hid the cost.  Now that they’re not going to provide it any longer, no one is going to be able to hide the cost.  You’re not going to be able to hide it in the tax code because no one wants a tax increase.  Few are going to consent to a tax increase, yet isn’t that exactly what’s going to happen?  Not only is that going to happen, but if you have to go off to a government exchange — let’s circle the wagon back to the VA.

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It won’t be very long in the future here, ladies and gentlemen, unless you have one of these bronze-plated health insurance policies that few can afford where most of us will be farmed or funneled into a

hospital that is run similar to the way the other socialized medicine hospitals are run.

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Yes, we call them VA hospitals, Veterans Administration.  Isn’t that nice to ponder on the eve of Memorial Day?  How ironic, right?  What’s Memorial Day supposed to be?  There used to be parades in every little hamlet out there.  It’s the day we acknowledge and honor and commemorate solemnly the sacrifice that many have made in all the wars, declared or otherwise, that this country has fought.

End Mike Church Show Transcript