While the killer of the UnitedHealthCare CEO continues to receive disgusting praise in some social media circles and from some left-wing journalists, it’s important to remember why health insurance is broken in the first place.
Brian Thompson, the victim in this case, didn’t deserve to be murdered under any circumstances and the deification of Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer, is a sick result of societal ills. On the one hand, some people admire the “bad boys” who commit heinous crimes but then look charming and almost sympathetic in their orange jumpsuits. Mangione is one of those villains but the praise for his evil deeds and the scorn against Thompson is sorely misplaced.
It’s not clear what Mangione’s real motive was other than a clear hatred toward the health insurance industry. Welcome to the club, pal! A lot of Americans dislike most of the insurance products they’re forced to buy whether it’s health, home, or auto. That doesn’t mean the average person wishes violence toward their insurance salesman.
With regard to health insurance, however, the system has been broken for decades and the problems were only exacerbated by the implementation of the Affordable Care Act under President Obama. Typically referred to as ObamaCare, the crux of the misguided law was an overhaul of insurance that basically put insurance companies in charge and funneled them more money with mandates to cover more things. In other words, if the government mandates Americans buy your product, your product can be terrible but still fly off the shelves.
The result of ObamaCare has been higher premiums, higher deductibles, and a continued growing dislike for the healthcare industry and health insurance in general. In short, nothing of what was promised by the law has been delivered.
As Allysia Finley writes in the Wall Street Journal, ObamaCare has been a failure by every measure set forth:
Well, well. Progressives are at last acknowledging that ObamaCare is a failure. They aren’t doing so explicitly, of course, but their social-media screeds against insurers, triggered by last week’s murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, suggest as much. “We’ve gotten to a point where healthcare is so inaccessible and unaffordable, people are justified in their frustrations,” CBS News medical contributor Céline Gounder said during a Friday segment on the roasting of health insurers.
Remember Barack Obama’s promise that if you like your health plan and doctor, you could keep them? Sorry. How about his claim that people with pre-existing conditions would be protected? Also not true. The biggest howler, however, was that healthcare would become more affordable.
Grant Democrats this: The law has advanced their political goal of expanding government control over insurers, in return for lavishing Americans with subsidies to buy overpriced, lousy products. (One might observe that Democrats are driving a similar Faustian bargain to induce automakers to produce more electric vehicles.)
At the same time, ObamaCare’s perverse effects are fueling public rage against insurers and support for a single-payer system that would eliminate them. Mr. Obama and Peter Orszag, the law’s chief architect, must be smiling. Mr. Orszag, now CEO of the financial-services firm Lazard, has dined out on advising health insurers on mergers he says were spurred by the law’s regulations. How convenient.
The law is acting as intended which is why people generally hate it. Americans are more and more disgusted with the private, over-regulated, and overly-controlled insurance market that they’re becoming more open to a socialized health insurance option. The point of ObamaCare was to provide a bridge to this system with small steps along the way. Americans would not accept government-run health care overnight, they would need to be poked, prodded, and finessed into that acceptance. Obama’s advisers were keenly aware of this.
Another so-called selling point of ObamaCare was to ensure everyone had insurance by forcing them to buy it, no questions asked. Democrats ran around claiming they expanded access to insurance which is what people really needed to be healthier. That was a lie then and it’s a lie now. Furthermore, having insurance with a $14,000 deductible is useless unless you are in a major accident or need serious surgery. Even then, you’re on the hook for fourteen grand before insurance pays a dime.
The lie about having universal coverage making people healthier is busted:
One problem is that simply having insurance doesn’t change people’s behavior. It does, however, cause them to use more care. This is a particular problem in Medicaid, since beneficiaries often rush to the emergency room for nonemergencies because they don’t have deductibles or co-pays.
Another problem: The nearly 100 million Americans on Medicaid or tightly regulated and generously subsidized exchange plans struggle to find doctors to treat them. Physician access for Medicaid patients has long been limited owing to the program’s low reimbursement rates.
It has gotten worse since ObamaCare expanded eligibility, as states have tried to hold down Medicaid costs by reducing reimbursements. A 2019 study found that patients were only half as likely to get an appointment with a doctor compared with privately insured patients before the law passed.
ObamaCare has made health insurance more expensive, and less flexible, and hasn’t led to people being more healthy on average. On the contrary, people are sicker than ever which should make it pretty clear that the practice of simply having access to health insurance doesn’t itself improve health.
But wait, there’s more! ObamaCare also limits access to doctors:
Patients with exchange plans hardly fare better. Affordable Care Act plan networks include on average only 40% of local physicians and 21% of those employed by hospitals. Patients must pay significantly more out of pocket to see out-of-network doctors. If you find a doctor in network, there’s no guarantee he’ll continue to be. Insurers are narrowing coverage to keep down costs.
They are also hiking deductibles, which this year averaged $5,241 for a typical plan. That’s up from $2,425 in 2014. Although subsidies reduce how much people with ObamaCare plans pay toward their premiums, they are stuck paying out of pocket until they hit their deductible.
In summary, the main villains who made health insurance worse were the architects of ObamaCare and any Democrat who voted for it, which was all of them, by the way.
Brian Thompson, as CEO of one of the largest insurance companies in the world, was simply doing his job to maximize profits for the company he was in charge of. Does that mean he’s a bad guy here? No, it does not, and he didn’t deserve to be murdered on the street in cold blood.
Furthermore, Luigi Mangione is not a saint nor should he be treated as one. The man is an alleged murderer and not a hero in any sense of the term. If found guilty he should rot in prison for the rest of his life where, ironically, he’ll get the healthcare he wanted.
The lesson here is that health insurance was never going to become better with more government regulation and control. The only way out of the health insurance mess we’re in now is to privatize the system, require clear price transparency of doctors and hospitals, and discourage the use of insurance for regular visits and routine care. Health insurance should not be involved in a visit to the MinuteClinic for a runny nose. The same goes for your car insurance which doesn’t cover oil changes or windshield wipers.
Insurance, by its nature, is to provide a means to pay for something you cannot afford to cover yourself. If your house burns down, you file an insurance claim. If your garage door opener stops working, you fix it yourself.
The system must return to one where the involved parties, in most circumstances, are the patient and the doctor with no middle-man insurance company in between. It’s not an easy fix but returning back to basics would go a long way in eliminating the chokehold health insurance companies have on American healthcare.
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