How well is 100% government-run health care working in the United States? Well, the Veteran’s Administration is 100% government-run health care. Let’s see how it works.

The Stream explains:

The number of veterans waiting more than a month for care just passed the 500,000 mark, according to new data on patient wait times released by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Patient data, current up through May 15, shows that the number of veterans waiting more than 30 days jumped by 10,000 in just two weeks, to exactly 505,880.

And over the course of a month, the number of veterans waiting more than 30 days surged by 23,000. The average number of days to wait for a primary care appointment saw an increase to an average of 6.89 days. For days to get specialty care, the average bumped up to 10.15.

The VA also provided data on vets who have had to wait for 1-2 months. There are 297,013 vets who have waited that time period, a figure which increased by 5,000. For vets in the 3-4 month category, the number jumped by 2,000 to 46,672.

Although the new wait time data is not encouraging, VA Secretary Robert McDonald recently downplayed the importance of that metric, instead preferring to cite other apparently superior figures like overall veteran satisfaction with the experience. To justify his prioritizing the “satisfaction” metric, McDonald said that Disneyland does the exact same thing and doesn’t place a whole lot of importance on wait times for rides as such, but rather how much its patrons enjoy their experience at the amusement park as a whole. Citing Disneyland plays to McDonald’s philosophy of bringing corporate management techniques to the VA from his private sector experience as CEO of Procter & Gamble.

“When you got to Disney, do they measure the number of hours you wait in line? Or what’s important? What’s important is, what’s your satisfaction with the experience?” McDonald said, according to The Washington Examiner. “And what I would like to move to, eventually, is that kind of measure.”

Shut up and wait, he says. Be happy you even get a place in line at Disneyland at all. And they get big fat bonuses for this, as I blogged previously. We are being forced to pay taxes to pay this clown’s salary.

But there is one kind of treatment that is a top priority for the Democrat VA administrators.

This is from the Daily Wire.

Excerpt:

A reported 307,000 veterans have died while awaiting health care from the Department of Veterans Affairs. In May of 2015, 53-year-old military veteran Thomas Murphy pulled into a VA parking lot, put a gun up to his head and pulled the trigger. The incident is suspected to have been done in the VA parking lot to bring awareness to the department’s unacceptable shortcomings. Again, in July of 2015, 30-year-old military veteran Tom Young killed himself after being sent to voicemail when he called the VA’s suicide hotline. In as recent as March of this year, another veteran set himself on fire outside a VA clinic in New Jersey.

And the list, sadly, goes on.

While the VA lets countless brave men and women who have served our country die due to their utter incompetence, bureaucrats from the department are focusing their attention on paying for highly controversial sex-reassignment surgeries for self-identified transgenders. As reported by theMilitary Times, a new rule proposed by the department “would remove a long-held ban on the surgery.”

The proposal claims that “increased understanding of both gender dysphoria and surgical techniques in this area have improved significantly, and surgical procedures are now widely accepted in the medical community as medically necessary treatment for gender dysphoria.”

“Gender dysphoria,” states the proposal, “is a serious condition that has had severe medical consequences for certain patients if transition-related surgeries and procedures are not provided.”

It should be noted that though the VA is claiming that sex-reassignment surgery is the proper response to the mental illness of transgenderism, many in the medical field have warned against such action. One of the more vocal is former Chief of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Hospital Dr. Paul R. McHugh, a man who has studied transgenderism and sex-reassignment surgeries for 40 years, who said that those who push for such surgeries which enable the mentally ill are simply “collaborating with madness.”

Johns Hopkins Hospital eventually stopped providing such surgeries after psychiatrists’ research led them to conclude that the hospital was “fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness.”

The government controls health care for veterans – it is 100% government-controlled. Should we give them control of the res of health care? It seems to me that government-run health care is basically mandatory taxation, followed by doling out health care to those who are most likely to vote for the radical leftists who now control health care. Don’t allow them to do take it over.

In other news, Obama has declared June to be gay pride month. This is what we voted for in 2008 and 2012, people. This is not an accident. All of Obama’s supporters are on board with putting the gay agenda above common sense. That’s what they voted for.