It needs to be said loud and clear: murder is not a “policy choice.” Grotesquely, however, socialized medicine advocates are taking advantage of the December 4th slaying in New York City of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson to press their policy agenda.
A Generation Lab poll released last week found that 50% of college students — a demographic largely conditioned by social media — viewed accused killer Luigi Mangione either “extremely” or “somewhat” favorably. Only 19% thought the same of Thompson.
In the background of such disinformation are such books as “Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans,” by Wendell Potter, Cigna’s former Vice President of Corporate Communications. In 2024, Cigna was the sixth-largest health insurance company in America, with $195 billion in revenue.
Among other things, the book instructed health executives how to survive an “ambush” interview by leftwing documentary propagandist Michael Moore, whose 2007 film “Sicko” praised Fidel Castro’s communist medical system, and itself became a major impetus for the 2010 passage of the increasingly troubled Obamacare system.
As Peter Suderman wrote last month in Reason Magazine, Obamacare’s high costs to participants hit hard because “it required coverage of a slew of federally mandated essential health benefits, regardless of whether those benefits were needed or wanted.”
Then, a spendthrift Congress (one of many) uncapped benefit subsidies in 2021 with the “American Rescue Plan Act” during the COVID-19 pandemic, and again in 2022 with the “Inflation Reduction Act.” Those actions allowed “households making up to $350,000 a year in some cases, to obtain subsidized coverage, at a cost of about $30 billion to $40 billion annually.” The subsidies expire at the end of 2025 and will present a major headache for the incoming administration of President Donald Trump.
Former Cigna official Potter now is pushing for even greater government dominance of the medical insurance industry. The Thompson murder prompted Fortune to interview him for an article late last month, “Former Cigna insurance executive says he quit after witnessing an industry that ‘puts profits over patients.’” He appears not to understand how a free-market system works, whether for medical care or MacBooks.
In the Big Government world of Obamacare, the Veterans Administration and other government-run healthcare systems operate according to political criteria, not market forces. If a government program fails to help people, it doesn’t go out of business – it throws more money at the problem, thereby increasing inflation and lowering taxpayers’ spending power, or harms taxpayers more directly by raising taxes and increasing bureaucracy. That in effect is the brick wall Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” faces as it tries to cut the bloated waste that produced an incredible $2 trillion deficit in the 2024 federal budget.
Potter, however, now decries a system that “forces patients and their doctors through a maze of approvals before getting a procedure, sometimes denying them necessary treatment.” As the reason for his resignation from Cigna in 2008, he cited a leukemia patient who denied a liver transplant because she was “too sick for the procedure.”
But what is the situation today, 17 years after Potter’s departure from Cigna? Last April, the Cleveland Clinic’s Daily News Stories headlined, “New Technology Benefits Liver Transplants.” A Dec. 2023 study in the National Library of Medicine summarized, “Advanced analytics is thus poised to transform management in LT [liver transplants], maximizing graft and patient survival.”
Such accounts are evidence of medical advances under our current system, not Potter’s utopian fantasy — one akin to Canadian Medicare, entirely run by the government. A recent study by the Frasier Institute calculated that wait times between referral and treatment in our neighbor to the North were far longer than those in the U.S., and were twice as long as patients could expect in 1993.
It should come as no surprise then, that a 2024 Ipsos poll found 42% of Canadians would jump out of their system’s non-profit lines and drive down to the United States to pay cash for care in our for-profit system – a scenario not mentioned by Potter.
While America’s health-care system is far from perfect, those clamoring for reform ought to apply the maxim from the Hippocratic Oath, First do not harm, and at least stop using the murder of a healthcare company as fodder for their policy agenda.
Bob Barr currently serves as President of the National Rifle Association. He represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia, and serves as head of Liberty Guard.
This article was originally published at dailycaller.com
