Death panel at work in VA

Talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh on Monday blasted the Veterans Administration as a “death panel being done on purpose” as the investigation into secret waiting lists and backlogs causing unnecessary deaths expanded to 19 states.

“These people are special. These are soldiers. They’re special. They got wounded in action … defending this country on missions assigned by their commander-in-chief and other commanding officers,” Limbaugh said.

“Now we learn of these deaths by attrition, secret waiting lists, and this is the real bad thing of it. People on these lists assume that they’re being moved ahead of the line. That’s the purpose of the secret list, that they’re going to really be taken care of. Because the backlog is so jammed, the line for treatment at the VA is so long that they’ve come up with this secret list business, and the people on that list think that they’re essentially being moved to the top of the class, or the head of the line, in front of the line. And they’re just being ignored,” he said.

“It’s simply unconscionable. So you have to ask, the natural assumption is that nobody wants these people to die, even if you add the death panel component, nobody wants these people to die, yet they are. At the very least what we’re dealing with here is a total inability to deal with this. And at worst it’s the death panel being done on purpose.”

He said he knows some people won’t recognize the death panel aspect, “even though the evidence is pretty clear.”

“When you have government employees receiving salary bonuses for ostensibly saving money by virtue of shrinking the number of people on the list, how does that happen? How do people end up off the list and not treated? They pass away. And if you’re gonna have government employees bonused on that basis, then you would be not that far out of whack to assume there might be some death panel at work here,” he said.

“If you don’t want to go that far, at the very least, there is rampant incompetence here and inability to run the medical treatment of the Veterans Affairs system,” said Limbaugh.

He said it’s a projection of what Obamacare will be like for everyone eventually, because the government is unable to run health care.

“There are people dying. If you don’t want to believe the death panels are the reason, then you’ve gotta believe it’s incompetence. But you can’t just say, ‘Well, you know, excrement happens.’ ‘Cause you could be the excrement next time,” he said.

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