After the pandemic began to wane in 2021, the healthcare industry, responsible for more than 20% of American GDP, or nearly $6 trillion, was thankfully no longer on the front page of newspapers.
That situation changed dramatically, Hollywood style, when a masked gunman shot and killed the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of United Healthcare, the country's largest insurer, on a public street in Manhattan and escaped. Had the killing happened in any other place, the murderer would probably have never been caught. He was wearing a hoodie, and there weren't that many passersby by at 6:40 in the morning.
Because it was New York City, which is one of the most surveilled places in America, traffic, police, and landlord video cameras captured images of the killer. Just a few days later, the killer was found at a McDonald's 300 miles away in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
The 50-year-old executive was married and had two young children. He was a fixture in the healthcare industry, loved by business peers, Wall Street analysts, and employees. As the leader of the largest insurer, he controlled the lives of millions of patients. The killer's motive is still not fully known, but initial reports say that he was upset because large health insurance companies repeatedly deny claims.
We have seen this movie before. The famous American thriller writer John Grisham, wrote The Rainmaker, which was later adapted into a Hollywood blockbuster starring Matt Damon and Danny DeVito. Almost 13 years before Obamacare was enacted into law, the film showed how an ideological lawyer representing a family filed a lawsuit against a private health insurer that had developed sophisticated internal processes to stall and deny claims - and won millions of dollars in damages.
Reactions to the murder and the apprehension of the killer were swift. Even before the executive was laid to rest in a private family burial, the narrative had shifted. Rather than express outrage at a dastardly act that took away a person's life and sympathize with the victim's family, the Left began to justify the killer's actions.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren spoke with MSNBC's Joy Reid. As Fox News reported, the lawmaker said:
It was wrong but also served as a 'warning' of sorts that 'you can only push people so far. We'll say it over and over. Violence is never the answer. This guy gets a trial who allegedly killed the CEO of UnitedHealth, but you can only push people so far, and then they start to take matters into their own hands.
Liberal Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., told CBS News:
This is not to say that an act of violence is justified, but I think for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them.
But the Left's obsession with federalizing healthcare was the root cause of the killing. Until Barack Obama came on the national scene, the healthcare issue was significant, but no practical solution had emerged. President Bill Clinton appointed his wife, Hillary, as the healthcare czar in 1993, only to see the plan dramatically go down in Congress in 1994, failing to win support even from Democrats. Republicans, with their Contract With America, took over the House as the "Harry and Louise" ad campaign portrayed Hillary's reform as overly bureaucratic and harmful to consumers.
MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, the "Obamacare Architect," said in an explosive video that the bill was cleverly written to cheat Congress - "to ensure that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) did not score the Obamacare mandate as taxes. If the CBO scores the mandate as taxes, the bill dies." Gruber went on to argue that "the lack of transparency was a huge political advantage."
Had the public been educated about the actual architecture of Obamacare—that a vast pool of healthy people pays into it to subsidize an enormous array of mandated benefits, including mental health counseling, for a relatively few—the bill would never have passed. But President Obama, working closely with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, bribed, cajoled, and even cheated to get the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010. The bribe happened when Obamacare benefits (premium subsidies, Medicaid expansion, cost-sharing reductions, and pre-existing conditions protections) were rolled out immediately - first to hook Americans into the program - with the costs (higher taxes, individual mandates, and employer mandates)) kicking in much later.
Fourteen years later, excessive government mandates to micromanage benefits have lowered competition among insurers, just like unrealistic mandates from the Dodd-Frank legislation after the 2008 financial crisis legitimized the creation of the "Too Big To Fail" banks. The five largest insurers - UnitedHealth, Kaiser Permanente, Anthem, Centene, and Humana - control 40% of the market.
Insurers dominate geographic regions by skillfully dividing up locations, and in some heavily populated areas, a single provider serves more than 50% of the market. The so-called "Healthcare Marketplace" is a joke. A family of two relatively healthy non-smokers on an Obamacare Bronze Plan can end up paying nearly $1,500 a month in premiums, with federal subsidies of almost $900 lowering the cost to the couple. But the entire $1,500 a month goes to the insurer. When it is time for the couple to claim benefits, they have to fulfill exorbitant deductibles amounting to $15,000 per annum. Plus, there are co-pays. In effect, insurers collect nearly $35,000 each year before paying out a single dollar in claims.
In 2023, UnitedHealth Group's revenue grew to $371.6 billion, an increase of 14.6% from 2022. Full-year 2023 earnings from operations were $32.4 billion, an increase of 13.8%. Net earnings in 2023 increased to $22.3 billion, compared to $22.1 billion in 2022.
The Left engineered the creation of bureaucratic monopolies in the healthcare industry obsessed with regulating products and an addiction to deficit spending, throwing money away to keep the Obamacare boondoggle alive. The Left has no moral standing to protest high prices and poor service and denied claims for a vast majority of people - because they caused the problem.
Unfortunately, the "You break it, you pay for it," store axiom doesn't apply in America. The Left breaks it; all of America pays for it.
