Starstruck adulation is the last response you would expect rational, compassionate people to give to the acts of a cold-blooded killer, but such is the twisted state of American political discourse that many otherwise intelligent and decent people have expressed admiration for, and even approval of, the gunning down of health insurance executive Brian Thompson. The alleged perpetrator, as by now everyone knows, was the privileged youth Luigi Mangione, who felt that, based on his own struggles with America’s health care system, he was entitled to deprive Mr. Thompson of his life. The fact that Mangione is conventionally handsome, and the fact that private health insurance company executives are presumptively diabolical, has led a distressing number of progressives to conclude that, in fact, Mangione’s slaying of Thompson was a righteous deed.
Wendell Potter, a former health insurance executive himself, and a convert to the cause of abolishing private insurance and promoting government-run health care instead, is not among those who lionize Luigi Mangione. In fact, in his latest New York Times op-ed, Potter is at pains to describe Thompson’s death as “tragic” and “horrific.” What Potter and the Times are not above, however, is exploiting the media sensation surrounding this execution-style killing in order to shine a bright and unflattering light on the health insurance industry, which was, of course, Mangione’s real target in the first place. Neat trick, that! No wonder Potter has been praised by left-wing icons like Michael Moore and Bernie Sanders. His zeal is commendable, even if his timing is obscene.
And what is the goal of people like Wendell Potter, health care analyst extraordinaire, and of leftist media organizations like the New York Times? It is, as it has always been, to abolish private health insurance. It is to maximize government funding and government oversight with respect to all forms of health care, with an eye to creating a single-payer system and/or extending Medicare or Medicaid coverage to all Americans, such that private insurance companies would wither away. The premise, as always, is that government-provided or public health care is inherently better and more equitable than capitalist health care. Let’s be more like Cuba, these brainiacs keep telling us, where every conceivable medical treatment is provided free of charge, and no one ever gets sick and dies (more or less)!
Now, is the American health care system perfect? No, not by a long shot. It is, as almost everyone agrees, way too expensive, bureaucratic, and reactive rather than preventive. Be that as it may, the advocates of greater government funding and control, like Mr. Potter, have been selling us the same bill of goods for decades now, and the one thing we can say for sure is that, whatever the ills of American health care may be, these crypto-socialists don’t have the answer.
Consider that Potter, like almost all health care advocates beloved of the editorial board of the New York Times, was a big supporter of Obamacare, aka the Affordable Care Act of 2010. Well, did Obamacare fix the high cost of American health care? Did it eliminate high deductibles and medical bankruptcies, which so offend Mr. Potter? Did it clamp down on health insurance company profits? No, no and no! Indeed, the expansion of government funding and control that Obamacare embodied, while it may have improved access for some, solved none of the fundamental problems of our health care system, and it appears to have worsened many of them. And that fact only confirms what we have known ever since the 1960s: the steady expansion of government funding for, and control over, health care has been matched by a steady increase in the cost of such care, and declining public confidence in the fairness and effectiveness of the American medical system overall. In other words, in so many ways, more government has not proved to be the solution to the problem – it has become the problem. This is a fact men like Mr. Potter seem incapable of grasping.
The good news, however, is that, with both houses of Congress now in Republican hands, and with Donald J. Trump returning to the White House, the Left’s and the establishment’s long-cherished dream of socialized medicine in the USA is and will remain just that: a dream. In fact, single-payer health insurance and “Medicare-for-All” are arguably more distant prospects now than at any time in recent memory. Thank heavens for that!
At the end of the day, America’s mostly private health care system still works, in many ways better than any other system in the world. What works even better, historically speaking, are capitalism and competition, and here’s hoping that, under Trump, we will get more, not less, of both!
