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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From LifeSiteNews
UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced Wednesday that he will indefinitely extend a ban on puberty blockers for minors under the age of 18. The only exception is for clinical trials.
Puberty blockers will be banned indefinitely in the U.K. for under 18-year-olds, except for clinical trials.
In May of this year, the then-government of Rishi Sunak used emergency legislation to temporarily ban puberty blockers for minors. Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced on Wednesday that he will indefinitely extend the ban on the supply and sale of puberty blockers.
The Department of Health cited the Commission on Human Medicines’ (CHM) expert advice that said there was “currently an unacceptable safety risk in the continued prescription of puberty blockers to children.”
The U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) already halted the prescription of puberty blockers to children in March. In May, the then-Conservative government introduced a ban, preventing the prescription of puberty blockers by European or private prescribers and legally restricting the NHS’s use of the drugs to clinical trials.
The ban was upheld in July by the High Court after pro-LGBT activists brought a challenge to the ruling because they “were concerned for the safety and welfare of young trans people in the UK.”
The prohibition of prescribing harmful puberty blockers for children was prompted by the Cass Review, an extensive report by pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass that pointed out the significant risks of the medication and the lack of evidence regarding the alleged benefits of puberty blockers.
Health Secretary Streeting said that he would “always put the safety of children first” and added that his approach would “continue to be informed by Dr [Hilary] Cass’s review, which found there was insufficient evidence to show puberty blockers were safe for under-18s.”
Earlier on the same day that the nationwide ban was announced, the Parliament of Northern Ireland had voted unanimously to permanently ban puberty blockers in order to prevent the province from becoming a “back door” for the distribution of the drugs in the U.K.
The co-founder of the advocacy group “Our Duty,” Keith Jordan, applauded the decision by Northern Ireland to ban the harmful drugs indefinitely.
“This marks a significant step in safeguarding children, preventing Northern Ireland from becoming a ‘back door’ for these unregulated treatments – a concern highlighted by Susie Green’s earlier attempts to circumvent mainland restrictions,” he said.
Susie Green is a transgender activist who set up a clinic in Northern Ireland in an attempt to circumvent the restrictions in mainland Britain.
“However, we must remain vigilant, as the demand for these drugs may drive young people to unregulated, dangerous sources,” Jordan stressed, urging lawmakers to prioritize safeguarding children.
From LifeSiteNews
‘Well, if you take a look at autism, go back 20 years: Autism was almost nonexistent, it was one out of 100,000. And now it’s close to one out of 100. I mean, what’s happening?’ the president-elect asked.
President-elect Donald Trump told NBC’s Meet the Press that his pick to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy Jr., will look into potential links between childhood vaccines and autism.
During the Sunday Morning interview with Kristen Welker — which one conservative commentator characterized as “an absolute masterclass” in dealing with hostile corporate journalists — Trump defended RFK Jr.’s quest to investigate the vaccines/autism link as Welker repeatedly insisted that no link exists.
Welker desperately wanted to coax Trump into saying that he’s outright opposed to childhood vaccines, but Trump repeatedly sidestepped her statements, serving up sound judgment for her listeners instead.
Trump would only say that if certain vaccines are shown to be “dangerous for children” they should be eliminated.
“When you look at some of the problems, when you look at what’s going on with disease and sickness in our country, something’s wrong,” Trump emphasized.
“Are you talking about autism?” Welker asked.
“Well, if you take a look at autism, go back 20 years: Autism was almost nonexistent, it was one out of 100,000. And now it’s close to one out of 100. I mean, what’s happening?” he asked.
When Welker insisted that studies have shown that there is no link between vaccines and autism, Trump allowed that “Maybe it’s not vaccines, maybe it’s chlorine in the water … I want them to look at everything.”
“Certain vaccines are incredible,” Trump said. “But maybe some aren’t, and if they aren’t, we have to find out.”
“When you talk about autism, and you look at the amount we have today versus 20 or 25 years ago, it’s pretty scary,” he declared.
RFK Jr. is known for vehemently opposing vaccines, a stance he adopted after the mothers of vaccine-injured children implored him to look into the research linking thimerosal to neurological injuries, including autism. He went on to found Children’s Health Defense, an organization with the stated mission of “ending childhood health epidemics by eliminating toxic exposure,” largely through vaccines.
Kennedy said in October that Trump had asked him to reorganize and “clean up” federal health agencies like the CDC and FDA. This would involve ending conflicts of interest that favor the interests of pharmaceutical companies over evidence-based medicine, according to Kennedy.
He further shared that Trump had tasked him with ending “the chronic disease epidemic in this country,” especially chronic disease among children.
The future head of HHS recently described the unholy alliance between government health agencies and pharmaceutical companies. He explained how lucrative government-mandated children’s vaccines have been for the pharmaceutical industry:
There’s no downstream liability, there’s no front-end safety testing – that saves them a quarter billion dollars – and there’s no marketing and advertising costs, because the federal government is ordering 78 million school kids to take that vaccine every year.
What better product could you have? And so there was a gold rush to add all these new vaccines to the schedule that we don’t need. Most of these vaccines are unnecessary. Many of them are for diseases that are not even casually contagious.
It was a gold rush, because if you get onto that schedule, it’s a billion dollars a year for your company.
And in many cases, NIH is earning the royalties.
According to Kennedy, more obscene than the huge profits being horded by Big Pharma are the vast number of negative side effects from all those untested vaccines.
“Neurological diseases” have “exploded,” he said.
“ADHD, sleep disorders, language delays, ASD, autism, Tourette’s syndrome, ticks, narcolepsy. These are all things that I never heard of,” Kennedy said. “Autism went from one in 10,000 in my generation according to CDC data to one in every 34 kids today.”
RFK Jr. as future head of HHS scares Nobel laureates and The New York Times
Meanwhile, 77 Nobel laureates signed a letter urging the Senate to oppose Kennedy’s confirmation as head of HHS.
Thee New York Times described Kennedy as “a staunch critic of mainstream medicine” who “has been hostile to the scientists and agencies he would oversee.”
To many Americans, those are the perfect qualifications for the next head of HHS.
The laureates wrote:
The proposal to place Mr. Kennedy in charge of the federal agencies responsible for protecting the health of American citizens and for conducting the medical research that benefits our country and the rest of humanity has been widely criticized on multiple grounds. In addition to his lack of credentials or relevant experience in medicine, science, public health, or administration, Mr. Kennedy has been an opponent of many health-protecting and life-saving vaccines, such as those that prevent measles and polio; a critic of the well-established positive effects of fluoridation of drinking water; a promoter of conspiracy theories about remarkably successful treatments for AIDS and other diseases; and a belligerent critic of respected agencies (especially the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health).
The leader of DHHS should continue to nurture and improve — not threaten — these important and highly respected institutions and their employees.
In view of his record, placing Mr. Kennedy in charge of DHHS would put the public’s health in jeopardy and undermine America’s global leadership in the health sciences, in both the public and commercial sectors.
It’s no surprise that those sitting atop the Big Pharma/Big Government/Academia industrial complex are displaying concern if not sheer desperation over Kennedy’s future role as head of HHS.
In October, Kennedy issued a warning on X:
FDA’s war on public health is about to end … If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.
Public support for Kennedy’s quest is evident in the post having received nearly 7 million views and garnering 149,000 “Likes.”
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