American Legion seems angry.Follow

With all the shenanigans around here this am I very cautiously clicked the link (there's no **** behind it).

American Legion does indeed seem angry - at least their Commander does.

If I got this right - Obama is planning on billing private insurance companies in reimbursement for services. The vets claim this is the the gov getting off the hook and that ultimately it means the vets themselves paying for their medical treatment. This particular article only presents the views of the AL.

Hmmm, interesting, though personally it falls way short of fascinating. On the surface it doesn't appear that a vet would be paying anything additional out of pocket. Sounds like it would be set up so that if the vet has medical insurance, through a job a spouse or whatever, that the VA will seek reimbursement when and where possible.

I guess I see where there could cause some awkward unforeseen precedent setting. But mostly I just wonder how much these private insurance companies would be willing to cover. If the treatment is for an injury pre-coverage I think what is actually covered will be pretty limited in many cases. If however, the insurance company will pay - well I'd say for the VA to get them bills in the mail.

Private insurance being the clusterfuck it is, I dislike the idea of subjecting veterans to dealing with it.

I'm always amused by the lame "Your medical decisions should be between you and your doctor, not you and the government" anti-universal healthcare argument. I've had very few medical decisions made that were just between me and my doctor. Typically, it's my doctor saying what he thinks is the best course of action and the insurance companies saying "That's nice, but here's what's really going to happen..."

I was viewing it as a private=primary thing but I don't have details.

One of the prime concerns of the AL is private insurance raising rates on veterans as a result of being billed for injuries the vets received in the course of their enlistment. Something that'd obviously need to be prevented.

I would, but my insurance doesn't cover avian influenza. Or avian syphilis.

My guess is that the proposal got floated and the Senate was "less than thrilled" which was Story #1. Then the American Legion got involved, was less than thrilled and posted their angry-gram which was Story #2.

Gonna channel Smash for a moment. This is an attack against private medical insurance. Can you noodle out why?

Someone from another forum described the plan this way which sounds considerably less asinine:

The point is that this puts all medical care square on the hands of the private insurance provider. Which means that employers of military, especially disabled military, will see their health premiums go up. This puts greater pressure on the employer to perhaps not hire that vet in the first place (which certainly affects the vet). And that's before the implication to the vet, that maybe he just shouldn't bother trying to get a job, but just live off the veterans benefits. Those do provide greater coverage if the vet's income is sufficiently low...


The broader issue is that he's painting the presence of a private insurer as a "nuisance" when combined with some state health benefits. The pretty obvious objective being that if you make it annoying and expensive enough for people to have more than one source of health care, it'll make the argument for universal health care that much stronger.

While that would be great, and is fascinating "Ignorant crazy guy guessing wildly at what things he doesn't understand might mean and coming up with doomsday" reading, it's not at all what this about.

Coordination of benefits is a fact of life in every facet of health care insurance in this country, this is nothing Earth shattering. Veteran's Status is a protected EEOC class, not hiring someone because of it will result in your company being destroyed in Federal court. If anything, it makes the argument for single payer health care much less compelling, as it works against the argument of an inherent efficiency gained by removing the entire coordination process.

Employers aren't going to care. ERISA compliance already prevents them from even knowing if these issues even exist in a potential employee. Obvious conditions like a missing limb or something carry the same negative employment consequences if they were the result of an IUD or a thresher accident.

All this will do is require health insurance companies to...shocking as it sounds...provide payment for medical treatments of people they insure. Save us from this RED MENACE!!!

You're on a roll!

You're naive enough to think that someone's going to write "Didn't hire because he's a disabled vet" somewhere? Seriously? I know you're insane, but not generally stupid.

You also completely missed the point. I know all of that. I said it would make employers not want to hire them as much, not that they wouldn't hire them (for exactly the reasons you outlined). It would make the employer painfully aware that he's bearing a higher load for health care costs than he would otherwise though. Which in turn, will make those employers more receptive to the idea of socialized medical care, especially small business owners, who I'm sure will be the focus of Obama's health care agenda.


It's about creating pressure artificially. By putting the costs for all of a disabled vet's care onto the employer instead of just those not related to his service, and making the reason for this that it's just too darn complicated to manage multiple providers, it puts that much more pressure on people to accept the "simple" solution of socialized medicine. They're using vets exactly because they are the one group that everyone will be outraged if their coverage is reduced. Obama can pass this on to the private carrier, arguing that he's not reducing their coverage, just "consolidating the paper trail" or some such non-sense, and if any private providers complain about the costs, they can be labeled as unpatriotic and unsympathetic to veterans. The "solution" will be to consolidate under one system. Which will have to be a federally run system.


That's the agenda here. Obama is using Veterans to push a social agenda. And *thats* what people are pissed at. The first coverage should come from the VA, not a private provider after the fact.

Please don't pretend to be that dumb. It's a nice charade for the uninformed, I suppose...


You know darn well that one of the agenda items for Dems right now is to get health coverage for those 40 million uninsured folks. And a whole lot of them work for small businesses. So the whole "They don't buy insurance at all, so it doesn't matter" argument isn't much of an argument.

They will be presented with a forced choice of private or public payer systems. This is just a bit of groundwork designed to ensure that that choice is as weighted in the favor of a government managed system as possible.

The White House is meeting with veterans groups again on Thursday. I expect that this will be their exit from the situation.

Well the hospitals have this all figured out for worker's comp cases.

I can see where it might be a good thing to get the health insurance providers to provide. Premiums are high and presumably an individual would get better health care through a private financier versus a big, bureaucratic government administration. However, I'd rather over-coddle the vets when it comes to health care provisions. It seems like there are too many ways for the vet to get the short end of the stick with the current proposal put forth by the Pres.