Thursday, September 10, 2020

This Obama-Biden Administration Failure Killed More Americans Than COVID-19


BY MATT MARGOLIS | P J Media


 AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

Everyone on the left is trying to blame Donald Trump for COVID-19 and the deaths caused by it. Gov. Andrew Cuomo is trying to blame Trump for the outbreak in New York. Joe Biden wants voters to believe Trump is responsible for the deaths caused by a virus that started in and was covered up by China for weeks before alerting the World Health Organization. Joe Biden has claimed “it didn’t have to be this way” despite having failed to present a single alternative response to the virus. In fact, he often plagiarized Trump’s COVID-19 response by “proposing” actions that had already been implemented.

What the Democrats and the media don’t want us to know is that their scaremongering campaign against hydroxychloroquine, a drug Trump touted as a potential game-changer back in March, could have saved thousands of lives had they not turned public opinion against the drug simply because Trump had brought attention to it after a French study showed it had promise in treating the virus. In fact, countries that are widely using the drug early to treat patients have much lower death rates than those that aren’t.

Had China not covered up the virus for weeks, the number of cases worldwide could have been reduced by up to 95 percent, according to a study by the University of Southampton. Each state had its own COVID-19 response, and the disparity between the states was dramatic. In fact, the five worst-hit states in deaths per capita (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island) account for one-third of all COVID-19 deaths in the country. Blaming Trump for how each state uniquely responded to the virus is absurd.

There is an actual example of government incompetence leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths nationwide—but it didn’t happen under Trump. It happened during the Obama-Biden administration. And their incompetence killed more people than the Chinese coronavirus has in this country.

The Veterans Affairs Department was notorious for its poorly managed health care system, and the Obama-Biden administration promised to end the horrendous backlog in VA benefits claims, some of which languished for years.

But the backlog of VA claims, which had been on the decline when Obama and Biden took office, skyrocketed on their watch. Unprocessed claims exceeded 900,000, with roughly two-thirds of all claims idling for 125 days or longer.

From 2011 to 2013, the time it took to process claims increased 40 percent, to an unthinkable 272 days. As a result of this backlog surge the number of veterans who died waiting for care and benefits skyrocketed.

And the Obama-Biden administration did nothing.

Even after reports of vets dying waiting for care started getting attention, the administration didn’t seem interested in solving the problem. In fact, as reports of falsified waiting lists and unnecessary deaths at hospitals nationwide started being reported by the media, the Obama-Biden administration not only refused to conduct its own investigation, but actually retaliated against whistleblowers.

Complaints of retaliation against whistleblowers were filed in 28 states at 45 facilities, according to the independent Office of Special Counsel. That’s systemic retaliation, as if the Obama-Biden administration cared more about the public relations disaster than the lives of our veterans.

The Obama-Biden transition team had been briefed on the situation at the Department of Veterans Affairs, which had been improving when they took office, and they even formed a committee to address the systemic problems in the department. They had ample opportunity to turn things around and improve the care of our veterans.

Instead, more than 300,000 veterans died while waiting for care from Obama and Biden’s Department of Veterans Affairs, according to an Inspector General report released in September 2015.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden are responsible for those deaths. The problems at the VA were fixable and they failed to fix them. We know they were fixable because President Trump actually did what was necessary to fix the problems at the VA.