Friends, the U.S. health care system is a maze of contradictions. Depending on who you ask, they'll tell you it's awesome and excellent, or abysmal and excruciating. Truth is, they'd both be right, because it's a multi-headed hydra, to say the least. I don't pretend to know much of anything about American health care, especially the business side of it, but I do know one thing for sure: big government is NOT the answer to what ails the system. We've tried that time and time again, and, so far at least, expanding government funding and control has only made the structural, fundamental problems worse. Fortunately, with the victory of DJT, we don't have to worry about being forced into a single-payer system, or "Medicare-for-All". The solutions that Trump and Republicans are likely to pursue are market-oriented, and that gives me hope. What gives me even more hope is the actions of men like Elon Musk and RFK, Jr., who want to uncouple government policy from corporate financial interests. Anyway, the subject of health care is the focus of my latest article, as you can see here:
Don't Believe the Left's Crocodile
Tears for UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson
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 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 grows 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 Wendell Potter, like almost all health care advocates beloved of
the editorial board of the New
York Times,
was a big supporter
of Obamacare,
a.k.a. 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 which 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
that 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!
Dr.
Nicholas L. Waddy is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Alfred
and blogs at: www.waddyisright.com.
He appears on the Newsmakers show on WLEA/WYSL.
And here it is at World Net Daily:
https://www.wnd.com/2025/01/dont-believe-the-lefts-crocodile-tears-for-health-care-ceo/
***
P.S. Here's a great article about what Javier Milei has been able to accomplish in Argentina. This is one of the few examples in modern history of a government getting smaller, so we ought to sit up and take notice!
https://nypost.com/2025/01/09/opinion/how-argentinas-javier-milei-proved-the-elites-are-all-wrong/?fbclid=IwY2xjawHtWLxleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHfFpJxshoYsa_a8AinAlwwSYPzzkE1mvQL1JfmQQGcNHUA11Ctw4iVaAfA_aem_eldILnHPi2iXMqlVN9D2tw
