The murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson inspired many voices on the left to demand the government take control of healthcare. Prominent Democrats such as Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tried to excuse the killing with claims that the anger towards private health insurance is warranted.
“I think what we need to ask ourselves when we talk about health care is why we are the only major country on Earth not to guarantee health care to all people,” Sanders said in the wake of the assassination. The leftists want to exploit the moment to advance single-payer, allowing the government to control healthcare completely.
It shouldn’t be surprising that Bernie Sanders and AOC champion this idea. But there are others who want to use this situation to push for more government control. One such voice is former Cigna executive Wendell Potter. Potter recently published an op-ed in the New York Times denouncing private health insurance and praising government intervention. He believes the answer is “Medicare for all” and led a group with this as its stated mission.
Bernie and co. may feel emboldened by the support for their proposals. But no matter who claims the government is the answer to healthcare, it’s not. In fact, the government is responsible for much of our healthcare woes.
Americans hate the high costs, limited options, long wait times, insurance haggling, and variable quality of our healthcare system. They should look at who made it this way.
The federal government limits consumer choice and increases prices. As the Heritage Foundation explains:
[F]ederal and state government policies have contributed to the increasing consolidation of health care markets among health insurers and hospital systems, reducing the number of independent medical practices, restricting patient choices and thus driving up consumer costs. In sharp contrast to other sectors of America’s more open market economy, there is far too little price transparency in health care; consumers and patients often do not know the price of medical goods and services until the mysterious bill arrives.
Government policy drives down quality of care, according to the Cato Institute:
[G]overnment health programs literally pay producers not to improve quality.
For at least two decades, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission has warned that in traditional Medicare, “providers are paid even more when quality is worse, such as when complications occur as the result of error.” One study found that when patients experience post-operative complications, Medicare ends up doubling hospitals’ net revenues from $1,880 to $3,629. Medicare rules reward private insurers for skimping on care to the sick.
Medicare’s quality-improvement efforts consistently fail to improve quality. A study of Medicare’s Hospital Value-Based Purchasing program found that “in no subgroups of hospitals was HVBP associated with better outcomes, including poor performers at baseline.” Medicare’s attempt to reduce unnecessary hospital readmissions likewise had zero effect on patient outcomes.
The same culprit is responsible for long wait times, per the Wall Street Journal:
Start with the reality that Medicare and Medicaid, two government programs, cover about 36% of Americans. Both pay doctors and hospitals below the cost of providing care. As a result, many providers won’t see Medicaid patients, resulting in delayed care. A 2023 state audit of California’s Medicaid program found 43% of appointments for urgent psychiatric care for children exceeded the state’s four-day standard.
A 2019 meta-analysis of state Medicaid program audits by Yale researchers found that low-income patients were 3.3 times less likely to get an appointment to see a specialist than someone with private insurance. Another 2022 study by Yale doctors found that Medicaid patients had significantly less access to the highest-performing cancer hospitals.
Obamacare, the last major government intervention in healthcare, made the whole industry worse and more expensive. In just a few years after taking effect, the “Affordable Care Act” doubled the cost of individual premiums.
Single-payer advocates like Potter might tout the glories of Canada’s system but then ignore the tens of thousands of Canadians who travel to the U.S. every year for medical treatment. Our care is still better than that of our more socialist-inclined neighbor.
Americans are right to be frustrated with our healthcare system, but Bernie Sanders and his allies offer the wrong solutions and the wrong people to blame. Our healthcare would be a lot better if leftists stopped trying to make it “better” through government intervention. They’ve been proven to only make it worse.
Actually government caused the problem that requires American Healthcare to seek solutions. More government is supposed to do what? More regulations, like making medical insurance companies pay for everything including forcing people to get vaccinations using products companies were subsidized to create, is going to do what? Since the ACA was forced upon the public they now pay 250% more to stay more unhealthy.
The solutions are obvious. Get government out of our lives wherever possible and especially when it comes to our health needs and costs.
When Obamacare “passed”, it stole $700 billion from Medicare. That is how government-guaranteed “access to care” (not actual care) works: stealing from Peter to pay Paul. What’s forgotten in all of this is that Medicare is essentially bankrupt, spending $1.6 trillion versus Social Security’s spend of $1.4 trillion last year alone. American citizens paid into Medicare, but those taxes weren’t put in accounts to pay for one’s future Medicare needs. They were stolen by our government to pay for something else, which is always the same thing…votes. Now government doesn’t even perpetuate the lie that anything is “paid for”. It’s all funny money.
Unfortunately, most of those whom we call “Americans” fail to grasp what the people who founded this country thought about government-sponsored goodies. Reliance on government is death for free people. Yet, the government led people down the road to serfdom. Entitlements are a form of capture. Once government has citizens in its net, they stop believing they can (or ought to) provide anything for themselves. We did this to ourselves and we must undo it if we expect to remain free.
I constantly hear from rehab facility managers that what was paid by Medicare last year is off limits this year. Without the theft of $700 billion to start with there would be no ACA. What’s more is that the $700 billion never existed in a lock box to be withdraw and used for start up capital. Instead lots of promissory notes existed and they pile up more and more every year. The current debt is one thing. The future expected debt must rise to over 100 trillion of additional promissory notes. How is that debt service going to be paid? You either default or inflate your way out. It is why everything I own is now based on its expected inflated future worth. What is amazing is that the BRIC nations have still not defeated the petro dollar. Everyone knows that unfunded entitlements supplemented by underpaid workers imported from the third world are not going to reduce the amount or even the velocity of the rising debt bubble. In fact it will act as an accelerant since those workers will be given more than they can provide.
You can’t borrow from Peter to pay Paul despite Paul demanding you do so else he won’t vote for you. Leadership runs America within a vacuum and the one I’m speaking about is the one between their ears. The American public gets it. Those coming up through the Darian Gap and/or on the dole haven’t a clue.
The concept of forcing companies to insure everyone for everything is why Medical insurance has risen 250% since the unconstitutional ACA became the Law of the Land. Did Judge Roberts figure it out when he defended it as a tax? No, he was as derelict as Luigi Mangione but nowhere near as stupid.
If United Healthcare were in the fire insurance business they would instantly be out of business. What California is asking Insurance companies to do would be like the Wuhan Lab demanding Medical Insurance Companies pay to do everything possible to save the victims of the next pandemic which they hope will soon be ready and expected to deliver a 90% kill rate. And when you get down to it that is what they do ask. The reason Medical Insurance survives is because people are not knowingly going to blatantly put their lives at risk the same way they sometimes do with their property and houses.
Way back, in the late 70s, my GP/GYN was a Canadian ex-pat, who was in the process of becoming a naturalized American citizen at the time. I asked him once why he left Canada and, being young& kind of snotty at the time, assumed that the cap on his earnings was at the heart of why he was so harshly critical of socialized medicine. What he said not only set me straight, it has stayed with me for years. He left Canada, where he was an OB/GYN, because he lost 5 patients in a single year to cancers that were completely treatable but were not treated because of rationed care. He said he could not stand by and watch people die on wait lists of illnesses that they should have survived.
When the ACA first went into effect, I was covering both my husband and I on my insurance through work. Immediately, the premiums more than doubled. Luckily, my husband had changed employers & could get his own coverage but even with him off my insurance, I was spending more for my medical insurance than I had for both of us the previous year and the deductible jumped from $1500 a year to $5000 on the policy that I could afford.
The irony of the whole situation is that, in the quest for “health care for all”, the ACA forced me ( and a lot of others) to purchase a policy that I could not afford to use and skyrocketed the cost of routine care to the point that I couldn’t just pay cash for an office visit. In fact, it became almost impossible to find a small medical practice or one that accepted cash payments, so in reality, the ACA put actual health care out of the reach of a lot of people.