Just Like Vets Waited for Care at VA Hospitals, Obama and Democrats Want Your Health Care Rationed

National   |   Carol Tobias   |   May 30, 2014   |   7:12PM   |   Washington, DC

The deadly rationing scandal at several Veterans Administration hospitals has many politicians running for cover, suddenly suggesting we offer veterans more private-pay options to the single-payer plan of the Veterans Health Care system.

But not Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama. They’d prefer the entire nation be forced into a single-payer system where the government replaces private insurance, a system that has inevitably led to rationing where it’s been tried.

On Monday, Pelosi was interviewed by Time magazine’s Ezra Klein about changes or improvements she’d like to see to Obamacare.

Nancy Pelosi: “I have some of my own suggestions that I couldn’t get through in the first round . . .”

Ezra Klein: “How would you like to see it improved?”

Pelosi: “Of course I wanted it single payer and I wanted a public option.”

pichealth57As if that would somehow make it better than the disaster we’ve already seen in Obamacare? How tone-deaf could one be to suggest a preference for a single-payer system now, when the nation’s clearest example of a single-payer model is seeing veterans die by the dozens for lack of care – in other words, by rationing?

But Pelosi isn’t the only supporter. Long before he ran for president, when perhaps he thought his words wouldn’t matter to a wider audience, Barack Obama made it clear the only thing holding us back from a single-payer system is that the public wasn’t ready for it, yet.

“I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program.” Obama said in 2003. “A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. That’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we’ve got to take back the White House, we’ve got to take back the Senate, and we’ve got to take back the House.”

So for Obama, it appears the only impediment, at least theoretically, is that his party doesn’t have control of the U.S. House. Well, elections do have consequences. Especially for those who might lose their health care – or their lives – because of them.

For Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the prospect of going single payer even seems to bring out a rarely seen sense of enthusiasm. In an August 13, 2013 interview with PBS, Reid said “What we’ve done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we’re far from having something that’s going to work forever.”

When then asked by panelist Steve Sebelius whether he meant ultimately the country would have to have a health care system that abandoned insurance as the means of accessing it, Reid said: “Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes.”

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That’s the definition of single-payer. No insurance companies, the government runs the health care system. Just like in the VA system.

And just like in that system, patients would die, needlessly and without recourse, because the government would be the final arbiter of whether you get treatment or not.

National Right to Life is working to repeal Obamacare, and is supporting legislation introduced by Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), S. 2191, to remove all provisions in Obamacare that enable the government to ration health care.

These actions, not expanding the deadly grasp of government to include the potential rationing of every single American through a single-payer system, could save an untold number of lives. I ask for your support.

LifeNews Note: Carol Tobias is the president of the National Right to Life Committee. This article originally appeared at NRL News Today.