Health
The People Cheering Brian Thompson’s Murder Can’t Have the Medical Utopia That They Want

Whether private or public, third-party payment for health care is a huge problem.
Evoking a collective scream of despair from socialists and anti-corporate types, police in Pennsylvania arrested Luigi Mangione, a suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Thompson, they insist, stood in the way of the sort of health care they think they deserve and shooting him down on the street was some sort of bloody-minded strike for justice.
The assassin’s fans—and the legal system has yet to convict anybody for the crime—are moral degenerates. But they’re also dreaming, if they think insurance executives like Thompson are all that stands between them and their visions of a single-payer medical system that satisfies every desire. While there is a lot wrong with the main way health care is paid for and delivered in the U.S., what the haters want is probably not achievable, and the means many of them prefer would make things worse.
“Unlimited Care…Free of Charge”
“It is an old joke among health policy wonks that what the American people really want from health care reform is unlimited care, from the doctor of their choice, with no wait, free of charge,” Michael Tanner, then of the Cato Institute, quipped in 2017.
The problem, no matter how health care is delivered, is that it requires labor, time, and resources that are available in finite supply. Somebody must decide how to allocate medications, treatments, physicians, and hospital beds, and how to pay for it all. A common assumption in some circles is that Americans ration medicine by price, handing an advantage to the wealthy and sticking it to the poor.
“Today, as everyone knows, health care in the US can be prohibitively expensive even for people who have insurance,” Dylan Scott sniffed this week at Vox.
The alternative, supposedly, is one where health care is “universal,” with bills paid by government so everybody has access to care. Except, most Americans rely on somebody else to pay the bulk of their medical bills just like Canadians, Germans, and Britons. And while there are huge differences among the systems presented as alternatives to the one in the U.S., third-party payers—whether governments or insurance companies—do enormous damage to the provision of health care.
Third-Party Payers, Both Public and Private, Raise Costs
“Contrary to ‘conventional wisdom,’ health insurance—private or otherwise—does not make health care more affordable,” Jeffrey Singer, a surgeon and senior fellow with the Cato Institute, wrote in 2013. “The third party payment system is the principal force behind health care price inflation.”
In the U.S., the dominance of third-party payment, whether Thompson’s UnitedHealthcare, one of its competitors, Medicare, Medicaid, or something else, makes it difficult to know the price for procedures, medicines, and treatments—because there really isn’t one price when third-party payers are involved.
Several years ago, the first Trump administration required hospitals to publish prices for services. My local hospital offers an Excel spreadsheet with wildly varying prices for procedures and services, from different categories of self-pay, Medicare, Medicaid, and negotiated rates for competing insurance plans.
“A colonoscopy might cost you or your insurer a few hundred dollars—or several thousand, depending on which hospital or insurer you use,” NPR’s Julie Appleby pointed out in 2021.
That said, savvy patients paying their own bills can usually get a lower price than that paid by insurance.
“When government, lawyers, or third party insurance is responsible for paying the bills, consumers have no incentive to control costs,” Arthur Laffer, Donna Arduin, and Wayne Winegarden wrote in the 2009 paper, The Prognosis for National Health Insurance. After all, the premium or tax is already paid, right?
Other Countries Struggle With Similar Issues
Concerns about rising costs, demand, and finite resources apply just as much when the payer is the government.
“State health insurance patients are struggling to see their doctors towards the end of every quarter, while privately insured patients get easy access,” Germany’s Deutsche Welle reported in 2018. “The researchers traced the phenomenon to Germany’s ‘budget’ system, which means that state health insurance companies only reimburse the full cost of certain treatments up to a particular number of patients or a particular monetary value.” Budgeting is quarterly, and once it’s exhausted, that’s it.
Last year in the U.K., a Healthwatch report complained: “We’re seeing a two-tier system emerge, where healthcare is accessible only to those who can afford it, with one in seven people who responded to our poll advised to seek private care by NHS [National Health Service] staff.” Britain’s NHS remains popular, but it has long struggled with the demand and expense for cancer care and other expensive treatments.
And Canada’s single-payer system famously relies heavily on long wait times to ration care. “In 2023, physicians report a median wait time of 27.7 weeks between a referral from a general practitioner and receipt of treatment,” the Fraser Institute found last year. “This represents the longest delay in the survey’s history and is 198% longer than the 9.3 weeks Canadian patients could expect to wait in 1993.”
You have to wonder what those so furious at Brian Thompson that they would applaud his murder would say about the officials managing systems elsewhere. None of them deliver “unlimited care, from the doctor of their choice, with no wait, free of charge.” Some lack the minimal discipline imposed by what competition exists among insurers in the U.S.
We Need Less Government Involvement in Medicine
“Policymakers need to understand that the key to ‘affordable health care’ is not to increase the role of health insurance in peoples’ lives, but to diminish it,” Cato’s Singer concluded.
My family found that true when we contracted with a primary care practice that refuses insurance. We pay fixed annual fees, which includes exams, laboratory services, and some procedures. My doctor caught my atrial fibrillation when he walked me across his clinic hall on a hunch to run an EKG.
The Surgery Center of Oklahoma famously follows a similar model for much more than primary care. It publishes its prices, which don’t include the overhead and uncertainty of dealing with third-party payers.
Those examples point to a better health care system than what exists in the United States—or in most other countries, for that matter. They’re probably not the whole answer, because it’s unlikely that one approach will suit millions of people with different medical concerns, incomes, and preferences. But making people more, rather than less, responsible for their own health care, and getting government and other third-parties as far out of the matter as possible, is far better than cheering the murder of people who supposedly stand between us and an imaginary medical utopia.
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Addictions
There’s No Such Thing as a “Safer Supply” of Drugs

By Adam Zivo
Sweden, the U.K., and Canada all experimented with providing opioids to addicts. The results were disastrous.
[This article was originally published in City Journal, a public policy magazine and website published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. We encourage our readers to subscribe to them for high-quality analysis on urban issues]
Last August, Denver’s city council passed a proclamation endorsing radical “harm reduction” strategies to address the drug crisis. Among these was “safer supply,” the idea that the government should give drug users their drug of choice, for free. Safer supply is a popular idea among drug-reform activists. But other countries have already tested this experiment and seen disastrous results, including more addiction, crime, and overdose deaths. It would be foolish to follow their example.
The safer-supply movement maintains that drug-related overdoses, infections, and deaths are driven by the unpredictability of the black market, where drugs are inconsistently dosed and often adulterated with other toxic substances. With ultra-potent opioids like fentanyl, even minor dosing errors can prove fatal. Drug contaminants, which dealers use to provide a stronger high at a lower cost, can be just as deadly and potentially disfiguring.
Because of this, harm-reduction activists sometimes argue that governments should provide a free supply of unadulterated, “safe” drugs to get users to abandon the dangerous street supply. Or they say that such drugs should be sold in a controlled manner, like alcohol or cannabis—an endorsement of partial or total drug legalization.
But “safe” is a relative term: the drugs championed by these activists include pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl, hydromorphone (an opioid as potent as heroin), and prescription meth. Though less risky than their illicit alternatives, these drugs are still profoundly dangerous.
The theory behind safer supply is not entirely unreasonable, but in every country that has tried it, implementation has led to increased suffering and addiction. In Europe, only Sweden and the U.K. have tested safer supply, both in the 1960s. The Swedish model gave more than 100 addicts nearly unlimited access through their doctors to prescriptions for morphine and amphetamines, with no expectations of supervised consumption. Recipients mostly sold their free drugs on the black market, often through a network of “satellite patients” (addicts who purchased prescribed drugs). This led to an explosion of addiction and public disorder.
Most doctors quickly abandoned the experiment, and it was shut down after just two years and several high-profile overdose deaths, including that of a 17-year-old girl. Media coverage portrayed safer supply as a generational medical scandal and noted that the British, after experiencing similar problems, also abandoned their experiment.
While the U.S. has never formally adopted a safer-supply policy, it experienced something functionally similar during the OxyContin crisis of the 2000s. At the time, access to the powerful opioid was virtually unrestricted in many parts of North America. Addicts turned to pharmacies for an easy fix and often sold or traded their extra pills for a quick buck. Unscrupulous “pill mills” handed out prescriptions like candy, flooding communities with OxyContin and similar narcotics. The result was a devastating opioid epidemic—one that rages to this day, at a cumulative cost of hundreds of thousands of American lives. Canada was similarly affected.
The OxyContin crisis explains why many experienced addiction experts were aghast when Canada greatly expanded access to safer supply in 2020, following a four-year pilot project. They worried that the mistakes of the recent past were being made all over again, and that the recently vanquished pill mills had returned under the cloak of “harm reduction.”
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Most Canadian safer-supply prescribers dispense large quantities of hydromorphone with little to no supervised consumption. Patients can receive up to 40 eight-milligram pills per day—despite the fact that just two or three are enough to cause an overdose in someone without opioid tolerance. Some prescribers also provide supplementary fentanyl, oxycodone, or stimulants.
Unfortunately, many safer-supply patients sell or trade a significant portion of these drugs—primarily hydromorphone—in order to purchase more potent illicit substances, such as street fentanyl.
The problems with safer supply entered Canada’s consciousness in mid-2023, through an investigative report I wrote for the National Post. I interviewed 14 addiction physicians from across the country, who testified that safer-supply diversion is ubiquitous; that the street price of hydromorphone collapsed by up to 95 percent in communities where safer supply is available; that youth are consuming and becoming addicted to diverted safer-supply drugs; and that organized crime traffics these drugs.
Facing pushback, I interviewed former drug users, who estimated that roughly 80 percent of the safer-supply drugs flowing through their social circles was getting diverted. I documented dozens of examples of safer-supply trafficking online, representing tens of thousands of pills. I spoke with youth who had developed addictions from diverted safer supply and adults who had purchased thousands of such pills.
After months of public queries, the police department of London, Ontario—where safer supply was first piloted—revealed last summer that annual hydromorphone seizures rose over 3,000 percent between 2019 and 2023. The department later held a press conference warning that gangs clearly traffic safer supply. The police departments of two nearby midsize cities also saw their post-2019 hydromorphone seizures increase more than 1,000 percent.
The Canadian government quietly dropped its support for safer supply last year, cutting funding for many of its pilot programs. The province of British Columbia (the nexus of the harm-reduction movement) finally pulled back support last month, after a leaked presentation confirmed that safer-supply drugs are getting sold internationally and that the government is investigating 60 pharmacies for paying kickbacks to safer-supply patients. For now, all safer-supply drugs dispensed within the province must be consumed under supervision.
Harm-reduction activists have insisted that no hard evidence exists of widespread diversion of safer-supply drugs, but this is only because they refuse to study the issue. Most “studies” supporting safer supply are produced by ideologically driven activist-scholars, who tend to interview a small number of program enrollees. These activists also reject attempts to track diversion as “stigmatizing.”
The experiences of Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Canada offer a clear warning: safer supply is a reliably harmful policy. The outcomes speak for themselves—rising addiction, diversion, and little evidence of long-term benefit.
As the debate unfolds in the United States, policymakers would do well to learn from these failures. Americans should not be made to endure the consequences of a policy already discredited abroad simply because progressive leaders choose to ignore the record. The question now is whether we will repeat others’ mistakes—or chart a more responsible course.
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Health
RFK Jr. says ‘everything is going to change’ with CDC vaccine policy in Michael Knowles interview

From LifeSiteNews
New Health and Human Services Director Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the CDC’s own reporting system ‘captures fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries. It’s worthless, and everybody agrees it’s worthless.’
When Michael Knowles asked new Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. if anything will change regarding the public’s justifiable concern with the growth of vaccines, Kennedy quickly shot back, “Everything is going to change.”
Kennedy pointed to the Centers for Disease Control’s current flawed VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) online mechanism.
By way of example, he said, “None of the vaccines that are given during the first six months of life have ever been tested for autism. The only one was the DTP vaccine. And that one study that was done, according to the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, found that there was a link.”
But “They threw out that study because it was based upon CDC’s surveillance system, VAERS, and they said that system is no good.”
“That begs the question, why doesn’t CDC have a functional surveillance system?” he asked. “We’re gonna make sure they do.”
“They don’t do pre-licensing safety testing for vaccines” he continued. “They’re the only product that’s exempt. So what they say is, if there are injuries, we’ll capture them afterward.”
However, “they have a system that doesn’t capture them. In fact, CDC’s own study of its own system said it captures fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries,” Kennedy said. “It’s worthless, and everybody agrees it’s worthless.”
“Why have we gone for 39 years and nobody’s fixed it?” he wondered, promising, “We’re gonna fix it.”
“We have DOGE (which) knows how to manage data. We’re going to be able to get into these databases and give answers to the American public,” Kennedy predicted.
“We’re going to have gold standard science, we’re going to follow the science, we’re going to publish all of our datasets, which CDC has never done,” he said.
“We’re going to do replication of all of our studies, which CDC has never done. We’re going to publish our peer review, which CDC has never done,” Kennedy vowed. “So people are going to have real answers for the first time.”
The new HHS head also discussed more broadly his mission after taking over the department’s helm, the mess created by the Biden administration, his job’s challenges, and recent developments thanks to DOGE.
“HHS is a $1.9 trillion agency. It’s the biggest agency in the government. And during the Biden administration, President Biden increased its budget by 38% and increased the workforce by 17%.”
“And by every metric by which we measure public health, health accelerated its decline.”
“When I came to HHS, what I found was a sprawling bureaucracy,” with functional duplication of departments, rampant redundancy and overstaffing, with various sub-agencies often acting in a territorial, self-protecting manner rather than a synergistic one.
“Perverse incentives” sometimes drive employee’s work,” he noted.
Despite his short tenure at HHS, with the help of DOGE, Kennedy has already released 20,000 “bureaucrats” from the department’s ranks.
“We’re going from 82,000 personnel to 62,000,” said Kennedy, carefully pointing out, “We’re keeping the scientists and frontline providers.”
Kennedy said that it has been really hard to fight against the problems at HHS and NIH over the last 40 years from “the outside.”
But “now I’m on the inside,” he declared. “This is the purpose of my life. It’s what I’m going to do over the next four years.”
He concluded:
President Trump promised to return the American dream to Americans.
A healthy person has a thousand dreams. A sick person only has one.
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