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

Published

4 months ago

9 minute read

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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Health

Selective reporting on measles outbreaks is a globalist smear campaign against Trump administration.

Published on April 4, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Robert Malone M.D.

Ontario has a larger outbreak than Texas. European cases dwarf the Texas outbreak. But the World Health Organization has launched a travel advisory for the United States.

In the currently ongoing outbreak, there have been about 572 measles cases in Ontario, Canada. This is a significantly larger outbreak than the currently hyped one in Texas, which has about 422 cases. The mainstream media has almost completely ignored the Ontario outbreak – their reporting has only focused on the Texas outbreak.

Ontario’s top public health official, Dr. Kieran Moore, does not recommend mandatory vaccination and says the standard public health measures to limit the spread are working. This is a very reasonable response, yet when Sec. Kennedy says something similar; he is viciously attacked.

It is evident by the mainstream media response to the Ontario outbreak versus the Texas outbreak that this is yet another example of the liberal media/pharma machine harassing Kennedy and President Trump.

However, this reporting has an even more sinister aspect – as the media appears to have taken their lead from the World Health Organization.

The World Health Organization has launched a travel advisory for the United States. See the screenshots below (the first screenshot is from an AI summarizer at BRAVE and the second one is from the WHO website):

But what about Canada’s outbreak? Why isn’t Canada mentioned in the travel advisory? Was it an oversight? Did the WHO release a travel advisory just for Canada?

In fact, the AI summarizer at BRAVE is clear that the WHO doesn’t put out travel advisories for individual countries, like Canada… The new normal is that the WHO puts out special advisories only for the United States <insert sarcasm>.

And in fact, a search on the WHO website yields not a single mention of the measles outbreak in Canada.

In fact, the WHO places the 422 measles cases in the United States on par with the earthquake in Myanmar, which may have killed up to 10,000 people, all told.

But somehow the 572 cases of measles in Canada don’t deserve a mention.

But wait – the story gets even more bizarre.

The European Region, which includes central Asia, continues to have a significantly high number of measles cases.

The WHO European Region has a population of approximately 745 million people, and had about 127,350 measles cases last year, or 1 in 5,850 people.

Yet – crickets from mainstream media on this factoid.

Why the outcry over 422 measles in Texas?

Here are some ideas:

  • To reduce support for RFK Jr., Trump, and MAHA by the American people.
  • To scare parents into vaccinating.
  • To increase the money going to public health for vaccine stockpiling.
  • To support the liberal left in their obsessive hatred of anything MAHA.
  • Because the WHO put out a travel advisory.

In the meantime, the WHO has announced that, despite budgetary cuts, they have a $2.5 billion gap for 2025-2027. WHO Director General Tedros correctly blamed Trump for the deficit. However, what Tedros gets wrong is that this deficit is a well-deserved consequence of years of corruption at the WHO leading to this outcome.

This is how it is done, folks.

This is called retaliation by the World Health Organization against the Trump administration.

Another wrap-up smear in action. The deep state and the globalists are pulling out all the stops to attack Trump and Kennedy via “trumped-up” WHO travel advisories and emergency reports that are then reported on breathlessly and uncritically by mainstream media. The propaganda machine continues unabated.

Reprinted with permission from Robert Malone.

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COVID-19

Trump’s new NIH head fires top Fauci allies and COVID shot promoters, including Fauci’s wife

Published on April 3, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X. “Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.

On day one of his new job as head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya removed four powerful agency heads, including Dr. Anthony Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, and others associated with the questionable handling of the COVID-19 shots.

Grady, who had served as chief of the agency’s Department of Bioethics, and other longtime Fauci allies in top posts at the NIH involved in the development and distribution of the untested COVID shots produced by Big Pharma were offered jobs in Alaska and other remote locales far away from the NIH’s sprawling Bethesda, Maryland, complex just outside Washington, D.C.

The purge came amid massive layoffs in health-related agencies under the umbrella of Health and Human Services (HHS), now headed by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement’s founder, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long questioned vaccine safety and American medicine’s focus on treating disease rather than preventing it.

A total of about 20,000 personnel – mostly bureaucrats – or about 25 percent of the HHS workforce have been or will be handed pink slips amid Kennedy’s realignment of the agency.

MAHA critics were quick to call Tuesday’s axing of Fauci confederates as “one of the darkest days in modern scientific history” fueled by Kennedy’s desire to exact revenge on Fauci’s former trusted associates who represent the antithesis of the MAHA movement.

However, the revamping of the federal government’s side of the health industry is no more harsh than the treatment meted out by those formerly in control who, at best, suppressed, and worst, punished those who questioned their iron grip on health-industry regulations and standards.

For years, Kennedy’s critics have dismissed his quest to revamp healthcare and his questioning of the efficacy of the COVID-19 mRNA jabs as anti-science, labeling him as an “anti-vaxxer” in order to suppress his messaging.

Dr. Francis Collins – whom Bhattacharya replaced as head of NIH – in an October 2020 email to Fauci condemned Bhattacharya as a “fringe epidemiologist” because he had co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized harmful COVID lockdown policies.

“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X.

“Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.

“We spend 4X more than Italy on healthcare — and live 7 years less. Dead last in cancer rates. This isn’t science — it’s a system profiting off sick kids,” explained Calley Means, RFK Jr. HHS advisor during an interview with Laura Ingraham following the NIH firings.

“Firing the people who oversaw this? That’s step one,” declared Means.

Other NIH officials who were offered reassignments were Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who succeeded Fauci as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Clifford Lane, a close Fauci ally who served as deputy director for clinical research at NIAID, and Dr. Emily Erbelding, NIAID’s microbiology and infectious diseases director.

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