The Forever Health Insurance Crisis

 

Let it be stipulated that last week's hit-man style murder of UnitedHealthCare CEO, Brian Thompson, a fellow citizen and a human being, who was also a husband and a father of two children, was a serious crime and a grave moral evil. No one should applaud murder. Nor should anyone take lightly the increasing valorization of political violence in our society.

That said, what should be made of the varied reactions to this tragedy, including widespread lack of sympathy for the victim and even some apparent glee over what some may perceive as revenge against the for-profit health insurance industry? At minimum, maybe this is yet another symptom of the terrible coarsening of our society and the disappearance of traditional moral notions and expectations of appropriate behavior. 

Stipulating all that, however, what else does this say about the widespread anger and frustration over the state of health care in America? The Times quoted this comment on Tik Tok: “I’m an ER nurse and the things I’ve seen dying patients get denied for by insurance makes me physically sick. I just can’t feel sympathy for him because of all of those patients and their families.”

Indeed, for-profit Health Insurance Companies deservedly occupy an increasingly notorious and infamous place among the objects of widespread popular anger and resentment among American people today. 

Yet, an alternative to our dependence on profit-making private insurance has long been available. It is called Medicare-for-All. If the Vietnam War had not short-circuited the Great Society, we might have made real progress in that direction decades ago - perhaps by a progressively lowering of the minimal age to qualify for Medicare. It is well known that President Nixon was willing to consider Medicare-for-All in 1973, but the Democrats - to their eternal discredit - did not jump at that chance to fix our health care system once and for all.

Medicare is much more efficient than private insurance, which wastefully spends a lot of its resources on denying and preventing rather than providing health care. Moreover, Medicare is widely accessible and publicly funded, as health care ought to be in an affluent society. 

Of course, an oligarchic government dominated by billionaires, whose main concerns seem to be tax cuts for themselves and reducing regulations that protect the public instead of their private profits, such a government is not likely to move in the direction of Medicare-for-All or any other serious improvements in our health-care system. If RFK, et al., were really serious about making America Healthy Again, they might start with resolving our forever health insurance crisis. But it is a safe prediction that no one will.