-By Warner Todd Huston
Let’s talk about a government healthcare plan that already exists. It might help us understand what sort of situation we might see when Obamacare is fairly begun. It’s not Medicare or Medicaid but the IHS, the Indian Healthcare Service.
Few have remembered during this debate that the U.S. government already has a sort of single payer styled healthcare program already and it is for America’s Indian population. Unfortunately, it has not served our native peoples well.
For example, recently it has been shown that the IHS has “lost” $20 million in high tech healthcare equipment bought by the federal government to care for Indians.
That’s bad enough except that the federal government has turned around and assigned $500 million in new funding from the “stimulus” spending passed only a few months ago.
“We found that property continues to be lost or stolen at
IHS at an alarming rate,” the GAO reported this month. “From October 2007 through January 2009, IHS identified about 1,400 items with an acquisition value of about $3.5 million that were lost or stolen agencywide. These property losses are in addition to what we identified in our June 2008 report.
Apparently fraud, waste and corruption is rewarded in a government controlled healthcare system. You see, there is no incentive to be on the up-and-up when you are a government lackey. There is no punishment for fraud and stupidity, only new showers of money forever coming your way.
It’s a dream come true, really… well, not for the unimportant patients, but for the bureaucrats that administer the “healthcare” program, sadly.
“We analyzed IHS reports from fiscal year 2004 through fiscal year 2007 and identified over 5,000 lost or stolen property items, worth approximately $15.8 million,” GAO revealed in a June 2008 report presented to Congress. “These items included all-terrain vehicles, tractors, and pickup trucks worth around $6 million; and ‘Jaws of Life’ equipment worth over $20,000.”
“Of the 3,155 pieces of IT equipment that were on the books at IHS headquarters in 2007, 1,140 items, or about 36 percent, were lost, stolen, or unaccounted for,” said GAO’s June 2008 report. “These missing items, valued at about $2 million, include computers, computer servers, video projectors, and digital cameras. According to IHS records, 64 of the items we identified as lost or stolen during our physical inventory were ‘new’ in April 2007.”
Of course, that isn’t the only fraud, abuse, theft, graft, and corruption at the IHS. There’s quite a bit more. Read the report at CNSNews.com.
Now here, a clever writer would say something about how the IHS accounting offices speak with forked tongue… but I’ll let that one go. It might be considered “racist,” and all. But, suffice to say that this is a taste of things to come when the entire healthcare system is stolen away from us by the federal government.
The feds have made a hash out of the IHS. Why should we expect any different out of Obamacare?
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, RedState.com, Human Events Magazine, AmericanDailyReview.com, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events and is currently the co-host of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Conservatism” heard on BlogTalkRadio. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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