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Reading: J.D. Tuccille, The People Cheering Brian Thompson’s Murder Can’t Have the Medical Utopia That They Want, today’s issue of The Rattler, for Reason.com (11 December 2024).

The assassin’s fans–and the legal system has yet to convict anybody for the crime–are moral degenerates. But they’re also dreaming, if they think insurance executives like Thompson are all that stands between them and their visions of a single-payer medical system that satisfies every desire. While there is a lot wrong with the main way health care is paid for and delivered in the U.S., what the haters want is probably not achievable, and the means many of them prefer would make things worse.

Unlimited Care… Free of Charge

It is an old joke among health policy wonks that what the American people really want from health care reform is unlimited care, from the doctor of their choice, with no wait, free of charge, Michael Tanner, then of the Cato Institute, quipped in 2017.

The problem, no matter how health care is delivered, is that it requires labor, time, and resources that are available in finite supply. Somebody must decide how to allocate medications, treatments, physicians, and hospital beds, and how to pay for it all. A common assumption in some circles is that Americans ration medicine by price, handing an advantage to the wealthy and sticking it to the poor.

Today, as everyone knows, health care in the US can be prohibitively expensive even for people who have insurance, Dylan Scott sniffed this week at Vox.

The alternative, supposedly, is one where health care is universal, with bills paid by government so everybody has access to care. Except, most Americans rely on somebody else to pay the bulk of their medical bills just like Canadians, Germans, and Britons. And while there are huge differences among the systems presented as alternatives to the one in the U.S., third-party payers–whether governments or insurance companies–do enormous damage to the provision of health care.

. . .

. . . Concerns about rising costs, demand, and finite resources apply just as much when the payer is the government. . . . You have to wonder what those so furious at Brian Thompson that they would applaud his murder would say about the officials managing systems elsewhere. None of them deliver unlimited care, from the doctor of their choice, with no wait, free of charge. Some lack the minimal discipline imposed by what competition exists among insurers in the U.S.

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. . . Policymakers need to understand that the key to affordable health care is not to increase the role of health insurance in peoples’ lives, but to diminish it,” Cato’s Singer concluded.^[1] . . . Those examples point to a better health care system than what exists in the United States–or in most other countries, for that matter. They’re probably not the whole answer, because it’s unlikely that one approach will suit millions of people with different medical concerns, incomes, and preferences. But making people more, rather than less, responsible for their own health care, and getting government and other third-parties as far out of the matter as possible, is far better than cheering the murder of people who supposedly stand between us and an imaginary medical utopia.

— J.D. Tuccille, The People Cheering Brian Thompson’s Murder Can’t Have the Medical Utopia That They Want
The Rattler, for Reason.com (11 December 2024).

1. ^[1][In a white paper that Tuccille referred to earlier in the article: Jeffrey Singer, a surgeon and senior fellow with the Cato Institute, wrote in 2013. The third party payment system is the principal force behind health care price inflation. —R.G.]↩