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

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2 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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Business

Canadians continue to experience long waits for MRIs and CT scans

Published on February 10, 2025

By

From the Fraser Institute

By Mackenzie Moir

Canada reported 10.6 MRI machines per million population, ranking us 27th out of 31 universal health-care countries and far behind fifth-ranked Germany (32.5 machines per million population). We see a similar story with CT scanners where second-ranked Australia (78.5 units per million) far outpaces Canada (14.6 units per million population)

Canada’s health-care system is in dire straits. We face an access crisis in primary care, regular rural emergency room closures, and some of the longest waits for non-emergency surgery in more than 30 years. Indeed, the median wait between referral to a specialist by a general practitioner and receipt of treatment was 30 weeks in 2024, the longest on record.

But beyond medical and surgical treatments, Canadians also face significant waits for key diagnostic services.

In 2024, the latest year of available data, patients could expect a 16.2-week wait for an MRI (more than three weeks longer than what they waited in 2023) and an 8.1-week wait for a CT scan (a week and half longer than in 2023).

Of course, these machines are crucial in the diagnosis and monitoring of many different illnesses. As a result, long waits for these machines can result in delays in diagnosis and the advancing of illness that can impact decisions around treatment and potential outcomes.

But why are there delays for this type of basic diagnostic care?

One explanation is that Canada has lower availability of these machines compared to other high-income universal health-care systems.

For example, using the latest available data from 2022 and after adjusting for population age, Canada reported 10.6 MRI machines per million population, ranking us 27th out of 31 universal health-care countries and far behind fifth-ranked Germany (32.5 machines per million population). We see a similar story with CT scanners where second-ranked Australia (78.5 units per million) far outpaces Canada (14.6 units per million population), which ranked 28th of 31.

These data also underscore the wider dissatisfaction among Canadians about how our governments steward our health-care systems. According to a recent Navigator poll, 73 per cent of Canadians want major health-care reform.

In the end, poor access to diagnostic imaging technology can prevent the appropriate triaging of patients and create further delays for scheduled care. Improving access to diagnostic imaging should help reduce delays for care overall and improve the lives of patients and their families.

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Economy

Human population set to decline for the first time since the Black Death

Published on February 9, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute

The world’s population is not only not exploding, it’s on the cusp of collapsing.

The collapse in birth rates that began in post-war Europe has, in the decades since, spread to every single corner of the globe.

Many nations are already feeling this death spiral, filling more coffins than cradles each year.

Just this past year, Japan lost nearly a million people. Poland lost 130,000.

However, the big story comes from China, home to one-sixth of the world’s population.

The decades-long devastation wrought by the one-child policy has sent that country, for centuries the pacesetter in population, into absolute decline.

China finally admitted that its population was shrinking, but demographers — including myself — believe that the numbers have been falling for almost a decade.

The Chinese government’s official population figure of 1.44 billion also greatly exaggerates its overall numbers, some analysts say by as much as 130 million people.

India, the country that has now overtaken China in population, is still growing, but not for long.

The average Indian woman was having only two children over her reproductive lifetime, the Indian government reported in 2021, well below the 2.25 or so needed to sustain the current population.

The current total fertility of Tunisian women, for example, is estimated at 1.93.

The result of all these empty wombs is that humanity just passed a major milestone, although not one we should celebrate.

For the first time in the 60,000 or so years that human beings first arrived on the planet, we are not having enough babies to replace ourselves. No wonder Donald Trump has suggested providing free IVF to all Americans “because we want more babies,” he says.

Because of ever-lengthening life spans, the population will continue to grow until mid-century. But when this demographic momentum ends—and it will end—we will reach a second grim milestone on humanity’s downward trajectory:

For the first time since the Black Death in the Middle Ages, human numbers will decline.

The 14th century bubonic plague was the worst pandemic in human history. It killed off half the population of Europe and perhaps a third of the population of the Middle East.

But even as the plague was filling mass graves, the survivors kept filling cradles. And because the birth rate remained high the global population recovered although it took a century or so.

This time around, we may not be so fortunate. All the factors that influence fertility, from marriage rates to urbanization to education levels, are pushing births downward.

Now you may be excused for not knowing about the current birth dearth.

After all, powerful international agencies like the UN Population Fund and the World Bank have done their best to keep it out of the public eye.

Moreover, these agencies, set up during the height of the hysteria over “overpopulation” in the 1960s, like to overestimate births in one country and pad population numbers in another.

For example, the UN, in its annual World Population Prospects, claims that 705,000 babies were born in Colombia last year, when the country’s own government pegs the number at just 510,000.

This is not a rounding error.

Neither is the UN’s claim that Indian women are still averaging 2.25 children, defying the country’s own published statistics, which show that it is now below 2.0.

All this number fudging allows the UN to claim that the global total fertility rate last year was at 2.25, still above replacement

It’s even wrong about replacement rate fertility, which it says is 2.1 children per women.

It’s wrong because in many countries sex-selection abortion skews the sex ratio strongly in favor of boys.

To make up for the tens of millions of unborn baby girls missing in China, India and other Asian countries, those countries need more need 2.2 or even 2.3 children on average.

The UN exaggerates human numbers for the same reason that the Biden-Harris administration exaggerated employment numbers: for financial gain and political survival.

There are billions of dollars at stake, funding that is fueled by a dark fear of mushrooming human numbers.

The population control movement does not intend to go quietly to its grave, even as it continues to dig humanity’s own, so it feeds this fear.

But the world’s population is not only not exploding, it’s on the cusp of collapsing. Which is why it’s time to end the war on population.

This article was originally published on www.pop.org on September 3rd, 2024, before being reprinted in the John Paul II Academy for Human Life and the Family’s Academy Review in November 2024.  Edited and republished here with permission.

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