Last week, United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot to death on a New York City sidewalk
in what was clearly a thoroughly planned-out attack.
Over the next few days, as authorities hunted for the killer, online progressives did not
try hard to hide their delight that a millionaire health insurance executive like Thompson
was killed.
Social media was flooded with posts and videos with different ranges of subtlety,
suggesting that Thompson at the very least did not deserve to be mourned because
of all the health care his company has denied to poor and working people.
Progressives framed the shooting as an act of self-defense on behalf of the working class.
Before the alleged killer was caught Monday, they promised not to snitch if they saw the
shooter themselves, and fantasized about a working-class jury nullifying all charges,
leading to other CEOs getting gunned down with impunity if they oversaw price increases.
The narrative that these online progressives clearly subscribe to and perpetuate is one
where, in the United States, health care is a totally unfettered, unregulated industry,
where because of a total lack of government involvement, wealthy CEOs charge whatever prices
they want and then refuse to provide customers what they already paid for without facing
any bad consequences.
The characterization of health care and health insurance companies charging absurdly
high prices while treating their customers terribly without the risk of losing them
is spot on.
But the idea that would cause this was a lack of government involvement in the
health care system is completely delusional, and this delusion conveniently removes all
the responsibilities progressives bear for the nightmare that is the U.S. health care
system.
Today, health care is one of the most heavily government-regulated industries in the
economy, right up there with the finance and energy sectors.
Government agencies are involved in all parts of the process, from the research and
production of drugs, the training and licensing of medical professionals, and the building
of hospitals, to the availability of health insurance, the makeup of insurance plans, and
the complicated payment process.
And that is nothing new.
The U.S. government has been intervening heavily in the health care industry for
over a century, and no group has done more to bring this about than progressives.
It really began, after all, during the progressive era when the American Medical Association
maneuvered its way into setting the official accreditation standards for the nation's
unregulated medical schools.
The AMA wrote standards that excluded the medical approaches of their competitors, which
forced half of the nation's medical schools to close.
The new shortage of trained doctors drove up the price of medical services to the delight
of the AMA and other government-recognized doctors groups, setting the familiar health
care affordability crisis in motion.
Around the same time, progressives successfully pushed for strict restrictions on the production
of drugs, and, shortly after, to grant drug producers monopoly privileges.
After World War II, as health care grew more expensive, the government used the tax code
to warp how Americans paid for health care.
Under President Truman, the IRS made employer-provided health insurance tax deductible, while
continuing to tax other means of payment.
It didn't take long for employer plans to become the dominant arrangement and
for health insurance to morph away from actual insurance into a general third-party
payment system.
These government interventions restricting the supply of medical care and privileging
insurance over other payment methods created a real affordability problem for many Americans.
But the crisis didn't really start until the 1960s, when Congress passed two of the
progressive's favorite government programs, Medicare and Medicaid.
Initially, industry groups like the AMA opposed Medicare and Medicaid because they believed
the government subsidies would deteriorate the quality of care.
They were right about that, but what they clearly didn't anticipate was how
rich the programs would make them.
Anyone who's taken even a single introductory economics class could tell you that prices will
rise if supply decreases or demand increases.
The government was already keeping the supply of medical services artificially low, leading
to artificially high prices.
Medicare and Medicaid left those shortages in place and poured a ton of tax dollars
into the health care sector, significantly increasing the demand.
The result was an easily predictable explosion in the cost of health care.
Fewer and fewer people could afford health care at these rising prices, meaning more people
required government assistance, which meant more demand, causing prices to grow faster
and faster.
Meanwhile, private health insurance plans were also benefiting from the mounting crisis.
In a free market, insurance serves as a means to trade risk.
Insurance works well for accidents and calamities that are hard to predict individually
but relatively easy to predict in bulk, like car accidents, house fires, and unexpected
family deaths.
Health insurance providers were already being subsidized by all the taxes on competing means
of payment, which allowed their plans to grow beyond the typical bounds of insurance and
begin to cover easily predictable occurrences like annual physicals.
And, as the price of all these services continued to shoot up, the cost of these
routine procedures were becoming high enough to resemble the cost of emergencies, making
consumers even more reliant on insurance.
With progressives cheering on, the political class used government intervention to create
a health care system that behaves as if its sole purpose is to move as much money as possible
into the pockets of health care providers, drug companies, hospitals, health-related
federal agencies, and insurance providers.
But the party could not last forever.
As the price of health care rose, the price of health insurance rose too.
Eventually, when insurance premiums grew too high, fewer employers or individual buyers
were willing to buy insurance, and the flow of money into the health care system
started to falter.
The data suggests that that tipping point was reached in the early 2000s.
For the first time since the cycle began back in the 1960s, the number of people with health
insurance began to fall each year.
Health care providers, who had seemingly assumed that the flow of money would never stop
increasing, began to panic.
Then came Barack Obama.
Obama's seminal legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare,
can best be understood as a ploy by health care providers and the government to keep
the party going.
Obamacare required all 50 million uninsured Americans to obtain insurance, and it greatly
expanded what these insurance companies covered.
Demand for health care shot back up, and the vicious cycle started back up again, which
is why the bill enjoyed so much support from big corporations all across the health
care industry.
Before it was passed, economists were practically screaming that the Affordable Care Act
would make care less affordable by raising premiums and health care prices while
making shortages worse.
Progressives dismissed such concerns as Reagan-era, free-market fundamentalist
propaganda.
But that is exactly what happened.
Now, the affordability crisis is worse than ever as prices reach historic levels.
And because Obamacare brought American health care much closer to a single-payer system,
the demand for health care far exceeds the supply of health care, leading to deadly
shortages.
There are literally not enough resources or available medical professionals to treat
everyone who can pay for care.
Also, the tax code and warped insurance market protects these providers from
competition, making it almost impossible for people to switch to a different provider
after their claims are unfairly denied.
If it were simply greed, denying customers who had already paid would be a feature
in all industries, but it's not.
It requires the kind of policy protections progressives helped implement.
And on top of all of that, despite paying all this money, Americans are quickly
becoming one of the sickest populations on earth.
This is one of the most pressing problems facing the country, a problem that
requires immediate radical change to solve.
But it also requires an accurate and precise diagnosis, something that this
week, progressives demonstrated they are incapable of making.
The American progressive movement is responsible for providing the political
class the intellectual cover they needed to break the health care market
and transform the entire system into a means to transfer wealth to people
like Brian Thompson.
Now, they want to sit back, pretend like they've never gotten their way, that
the government has never done anything with the health care market, and that
these health care executives just popped up and started doing this all on their
own, all so they can celebrate him being gunned down in the street.
It's disgusting.
Brian Thompson acted exactly like every economically literate person over
the last 50 years has said health insurance CEOs would act that
progressives got their way.
If we're ever going to see the end of this century long nightmare, we
need to start listening to the people who have gotten it right, not those who
pretend they are blameless as they fantasize online about others starting
a violent revolution.