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Health

The People Cheering Brian Thompson’s Murder Can’t Have the Medical Utopia That They Want

Published

1 year ago

9 minute read

Whether private or public, third-party payment for health care is a huge problem.

Evoking a collective scream of despair from socialists and anti-corporate types, police in Pennsylvania arrested Luigi Mangione, a suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Thompson, they insist, stood in the way of the sort of health care they think they deserve and shooting him down on the street was some sort of bloody-minded strike for justice.

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.

Third-Party Payers, Both Public and Private, Raise Costs

“Contrary to ‘conventional wisdom,’ health insurance—private or otherwise—does not make health care more affordable,” 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.”

In the U.S., the dominance of third-party payment, whether Thompson’s UnitedHealthcare, one of its competitors, Medicare, Medicaid, or something else, makes it difficult to know the price for procedures, medicines, and treatments—because there really isn’t one price when third-party payers are involved.

Several years ago, the first Trump administration required hospitals to publish prices for services. My local hospital offers an Excel spreadsheet with wildly varying prices for procedures and services, from different categories of self-pay, Medicare, Medicaid, and negotiated rates for competing insurance plans.

“A colonoscopy might cost you or your insurer a few hundred dollars—or several thousand, depending on which hospital or insurer you use,” NPR’s Julie Appleby pointed out in 2021.

That said, savvy patients paying their own bills can usually get a lower price than that paid by insurance.

“When government, lawyers, or third party insurance is responsible for paying the bills, consumers have no incentive to control costs,” Arthur Laffer, Donna Arduin, and Wayne Winegarden wrote in the 2009 paper, The Prognosis for National Health Insurance. After all, the premium or tax is already paid, right?

Other Countries Struggle With Similar Issues

Concerns about rising costs, demand, and finite resources apply just as much when the payer is the government.

“State health insurance patients are struggling to see their doctors towards the end of every quarter, while privately insured patients get easy access,” Germany’s Deutsche Welle reported in 2018. “The researchers traced the phenomenon to Germany’s ‘budget’ system, which means that state health insurance companies only reimburse the full cost of certain treatments up to a particular number of patients or a particular monetary value.” Budgeting is quarterly, and once it’s exhausted, that’s it.

Last year in the U.K., a Healthwatch report complained: “We’re seeing a two-tier system emerge, where healthcare is accessible only to those who can afford it, with one in seven people who responded to our poll advised to seek private care by NHS [National Health Service] staff.” Britain’s NHS remains popular, but it has long struggled with the demand and expense for cancer care and other expensive treatments.

And Canada’s single-payer system famously relies heavily on long wait times to ration care. “In 2023, physicians report a median wait time of 27.7 weeks between a referral from a general practitioner and receipt of treatment,” the Fraser Institute found last year. “This represents the longest delay in the survey’s history and is 198% longer than the 9.3 weeks Canadian patients could expect to wait in 1993.”

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.

We Need Less Government Involvement in Medicine

“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.

My family found that true when we contracted with a primary care practice that refuses insurance. We pay fixed annual fees, which includes exams, laboratory services, and some procedures. My doctor caught my atrial fibrillation when he walked me across his clinic hall on a hunch to run an EKG.

The Surgery Center of Oklahoma famously follows a similar model for much more than primary care. It publishes its prices, which don’t include the overhead and uncertainty of dealing with third-party payers.

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.

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Alberta

A Christmas wish list for health-care reform

Published on December 23, 2025

By

From the Fraser Institute

By Nadeem Esmail and Mackenzie Moir

It’s an exciting time in Canadian health-care policy. But even the slew of new reforms in Alberta only go part of the way to using all the policy tools employed by high performing universal health-care systems.

For 2026, for the sake of Canadian patients, let’s hope Alberta stays the path on changes to how hospitals are paid and allowing some private purchases of health care, and that other provinces start to catch up.

While Alberta’s new reforms were welcome news this year, it’s clear Canada’s health-care system continued to struggle. Canadians were reminded by our annual comparison of health care systems that they pay for one of the developed world’s most expensive universal health-care systems, yet have some of the fewest physicians and hospital beds, while waiting in some of the longest queues.

And speaking of queues, wait times across Canada for non-emergency care reached the second-highest level ever measured at 28.6 weeks from general practitioner referral to actual treatment. That’s more than triple the wait of the early 1990s despite decades of government promises and spending commitments. Other work found that at least 23,746 patients died while waiting for care, and nearly 1.3 million Canadians left our overcrowded emergency rooms without being treated.

At least one province has shown a genuine willingness to do something about these problems.

The Smith government in Alberta announced early in the year that it would move towards paying hospitals per-patient treated as opposed to a fixed annual budget, a policy approach that Quebec has been working on for years. Albertans will also soon be able purchase, at least in a limited way, some diagnostic and surgical services for themselves, which is again already possible in Quebec. Alberta has also gone a step further by allowing physicians to work in both public and private settings.

While controversial in Canada, these approaches simply mirror what is being done in all of the developed world’s top-performing universal health-care systems. Australia, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland all pay their hospitals per patient treated, and allow patients the opportunity to purchase care privately if they wish. They all also have better and faster universally accessible health care than Canada’s provinces provide, while spending a little more (Switzerland) or less (Australia, Germany, the Netherlands) than we do.

While these reforms are clearly a step in the right direction, there’s more to be done.

Even if we include Alberta’s reforms, these countries still do some very important things differently.

Critically, all of these countries expect patients to pay a small amount for their universally accessible services. The reasoning is straightforward: we all spend our own money more carefully than we spend someone else’s, and patients will make more informed decisions about when and where it’s best to access the health-care system when they have to pay a little out of pocket.

The evidence around this policy is clear—with appropriate safeguards to protect the very ill and exemptions for lower-income and other vulnerable populations, the demand for outpatient healthcare services falls, reducing delays and freeing up resources for others.

Charging patients even small amounts for care would of course violate the Canada Health Act, but it would also emulate the approach of 100 per cent of the developed world’s top-performing health-care systems. In this case, violating outdated federal policy means better universal health care for Canadians.

These top-performing countries also see the private sector and innovative entrepreneurs as partners in delivering universal health care. A relationship that is far different from the limited individual contracts some provinces have with private clinics and surgical centres to provide care in Canada. In these other countries, even full-service hospitals are operated by private providers. Importantly, partnering with innovative private providers, even hospitals, to deliver universal health care does not violate the Canada Health Act.

So, while Alberta has made strides this past year moving towards the well-established higher performance policy approach followed elsewhere, the Smith government remains at least a couple steps short of truly adopting a more Australian or European approach for health care. And other provinces have yet to even get to where Alberta will soon be.

Let’s hope in 2026 that Alberta keeps moving towards a truly world class universal health-care experience for patients, and that the other provinces catch up.

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Health

FDA warns ‘breast binder’ manufacturers to stop marketing to gender-confused girls

Published on December 21, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

Dr. Marty Makary took aim at the transgender-medical-industrial complex that has exploded in recent years during a recent press conference.

Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner Dr. Marty Makary has sternly warned companies manufacturing “breast binders” to cease marketing and supplying their product to gender-confused girls seeking to make their bodies appear masculine.

“Today the FDA is taking action,” said Makary in a press conference. “We are sending warning letters to 12 manufacturers and retailers for illegal marketing of breast binders for children, for the purposes of treating gender dysphoria.”

“Breast binders are a class one medical device with legitimate medical users, such as being used by women after breast cancer surgery,” but “these binders are not benign,” he cautioned. “Long-term usage has been associated with pain, compromised lung function, and even difficulty breast feeding later in life.”

“The warning letters will formally notify the companies of their significant regulatory violations and require prompt corrective action,” said the FDA head.

The warning letter addressed to California manufacturer, GenderBender, notes that the company’s website states that “[c]hest binding is the practice of compressing breast mass into a more masculine shape, often done in the LGBTQ community for gender euphoria.”

“Your firm should take prompt action to address any violations identified in this letter. Failure to adequately address this matter may result in regulatory action being initiated by the FDA without further notice. These actions include, but are not limited to, seizure and injunction,” advised the FDA.

During his presentation, Makary took aim at the transgender-medical-industrial complex that has exploded in recent years. 

“One of the most barbaric features of a society is the genital mutilation of its children,” observed Makary.

“This ideology is a belief system that some teachers, some pediatricians, and others are selling to children without their parents knowing sometimes, or with a deliberate attempt to remove parents from the decision making,” Makary explained.

To witness society “putting kids on a path of chest binders, drugs, castration, mastectomies, and other procedures is a path that now many kids regret,” he lamented, as he pointed to Chloe Cole, who has reverted to her God-given femininity after undergoing so-called “gender-affirming” surgery as a teen.

Cole is a leading voice for young people who have “detransitioned” after having medically, surgically, and socially attempted to “transition” to a member of the opposite sex.

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