The most telling sentence in a lengthy Wall Street Journal article about Luigi Mangione, the Ivy League-educated scion of a prominent Maryland family who is suspected of shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, is surprisingly banal: “It wasn’t clear what dealings he had with health insurance companies.”
As Business Insider reported, Mangione complained about terrible back pain in social-media posts “and what he felt to be the healthcare system’s inadequate response.” None of those posts “blame UnitedHealthcare—or Thompson—for his health issues.” So we don’t know about his personal healthcare experiences, but it is clear from the handwritten notes found in his backpack that he has a beef with our healthcare system.
Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein published those scribblings in their entirety, in which Mangione says, “the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy.” These companies have “simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it.”
That argument has gained traction, but not in a thoughtful way. Instead, the social-media world has been at its ugliest, with myriad posts that make light of the incident. Many reactions were downright ghoulish and, quite frankly, make me fear for the future of the country.
Mangione was arrested at a McDonald’s near Altoona, Pennsylvania, after a worker phoned in a tip. As Newsweek reported, police say that “officers and locals involved in the arrest have received threats since Mangione’s arrest…Google removed a number of disparaging one-star reviews about the restaurant, many of which included mentions about ‘rats’ in the kitchen.” Green jackets similar to the one Mangione wore have become an instant sales hit.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) called the killing “outrageous” and “unacceptable,” per HuffPost, and then offered this critique: “I think what the outpouring of anger at the health care industry tells us is that millions of people understand that health care is a human right and that you cannot have people in the insurance industry rejecting needed health care for people while they make billions of dollars in profit.”
Leftists criticize the healthcare insurance system as they seek a single-payer or Medicare for All system. Yet the problems with American health care are complex and not easily pinned on one source (insurers!). Summarizing medical research, the Washington Monthly‘s Bill Scher concluded that the widening life expectancy gap between the United States and other developed nations may be caused by obesity, high suicide rates, illegal drug epidemics, and socioeconomic disparities.
Government is no panacea. Healthcare spending has increased in tandem with stepped-up government mandates and subsidies. Having experienced a health insurance quagmire involving my family, I’m well aware of people’s legitimate frustration with the current system, its red tape, insurers who offer denials rather than providing needed coverage, and the stress of dealing with insurance absurdities in the midst of a troubling health crisis.
However, most of my experiences with our system have been laudable, as we’ve usually gained high-level care in a timely manner (check out wait times in countries with national health systems)—and then just get a bill at the end for a small portion of it. Prices are indeed inflated, which is the result of any third-party system where someone else pays the costs and when there’s no conceivable way to shop around for the best prices. And it should go without saying that complex heart surgery or knee replacements are fundamentally costly procedures.
Figuring out how to improve healthcare services is a complicated topic fraught with inherent conundrums. For instance, the demand for health care will always be higher than the supply. The more successful the care, the longer we’ll live—and the more of it we’ll need as we get older. Profit-based systems are the ones that best promote life-saving innovations.
There are only two ways to parcel out goods and services that have a higher demand than supply: pricing or rationing. Government healthcare monopolies are notorious for rationing care and for leaving customers with far fewer alternatives or avenues to challenge those decisions.
“There is, in the U.K., a government agency that decides which treatments are worth covering, and for whom. It is an agency that has even decided, from the government’s perspective, how much a life is worth in hard currency,” Jonah Goldberg explained. He asked if we’d hear the same type of reactions “(i)f some punk kid stalked and shot the director of the VA, Medicare and Medicaid, or the U.K.’s National Health System.” He doubts it, as do I.
We don’t know anything conclusive at this point. But if you’re justifying the killing of a healthcare CEO—or even having schadenfreude about it—then you ought to check out your health plan’s mental-health coverage options and take advantage of them immediately.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
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