On December 4, someone murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson near the site of the company’s annual investors’ meeting. Thompson’s killing was clearly planned rather than random, and at least appears to be job-related. As I write this, the suspect remains at large.

The establishment response, as usual with assassinations, combines “thoughts and prayers” with condemnation.

Social media responses, on the other hand, largely riff on Americans’ complaints about healthcare in general, and healthcare firms in particular. On a brief survey, I’m seeing lots of “poetic justice,” and not a little “more, please.”

I certainly feel the plaintiffs’ pains, and confess to frequently finding myself less than satisfied with my family’s (employer-provided) healthcare coverage. If this “targeted killing” is indeed a “customer dissatisfaction” incident, I guess I understand the sentiment even if I don’t approve of the particular penalty imposed upon Mr. Thompson’s person. Insert thoughts/prayers/condemnation language of your choice here.

What I don’t agree with is characterization of the whole matter as relating to “insurance.” It almost certainly doesn’t, because it’s been decades since most American healthcare companies have really offered “insurance.”

The system we’ve lived under since the early 1970s and the inception of the “Health Maintenance Organization” /  “Preferred Provider Organization” isn’t “insurance” — it’s “prepaid healthcare.”

“Insurance” is a hedged betting strategy. The customer makes a small bet that something unlikely and unpleasant will occur. The insurer makes a large bet that it WON’T occur.

To the customer, it’s worth betting $10 a month that he will suffer a heart attack, cancer, etc. and collect a large amount of money to cover his medical costs. The horrific medical emergency may be unlikely, but it’s expensive if it happens. Better $10 a month out of pocket now than $100,000 all at once later.

The insurer takes many such bets, knowing most of those heart attacks, etc. won’t happen. It will win far more often than it loses, and pay out less money than it takes in.

Does that sound like YOUR healthcare plan? Probably not.  Your plan probably at least partially subsidizes  everything from annual exams to routine vaccinations to prescriptions to diagnostic tests (chest CTs, mammograms, and colonoscopies, for example).

Yes, there’s an “insurance” component — you’ve still got that hedged bet in favor of that heart attack, the company still has one in against it — but you’re mostly just paying a middleman to partially cover stuff you’d have paid out of pocket for 60 years ago.

That middleman isn’t prepared to operate at a loss and go bankrupt.

Just as with actual insurance, you (or your employer, ever since World War 2 era tax rules began incentivizing insurance as a “fringe benefit”) WILL fork over more in premiums and “copays” for those benefits than it costs the middleman to provide them.

When a middleman (an employer) pays the piper (the healthcare company), and doctors work as the the piper’s orchestra, patient choice and patient satisfaction cease to be major incentives.

The problem isn’t the Brian Thompsons. It’s the system they — and you — are part of.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Bad opinion pieces in papers of record” are getting a bad rap from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The congresswoman took to Bluesky on December 2 to suggest discussing “thinkers we find valuable” and avoiding “linking to bad columns” so that “incentives change” for news outlets chasing attention (and, presumably, ad revenue).

Such voluntary mindfulness avoids the appeal to force in Ocasio-Cortez’s previous intimation that  “one billionaire … shouldn’t be allowed to own so much of the internet.” (Would a flourishing Bluesky be satisfied with a valuation of $999,999,999?) The Dr. Evil a couple years back was not Twitter purchaser Elon Musk but Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, whose holdings included the Instagram where Ocasio-Cortez posted.

Still, that’s halfway to Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s maxim that “the cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.” The “better argument” of the other half may well come from a cold, hard look at the “fallacious argument.” Sagan and Druyan note John Stuart Mill’s contention that truth arises from “collision with error,” elaborating that “if we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that; it becomes stale, soon learned only by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.”

Such pallor might blanch Bluesky’s atmosphere if it drowns out a no-longer-silent majority. Ocasio-Cortez’s November takeaway on the site: “[A]n echo chamber just won a presidential election.”

That interpretation is unconvincing when Trump’s constituency compounded consistently nationwide, amid the ruins of early-2000s interventionist expansionism and a level of economic elitism that made a landlord playing a boss on TV seem like an upstart.

In particular, support for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq was bolstered by Thomas L. Friedman downplaying warning signs in New York Times rather than New York Post columns. Friedman wanted to “take a very big stick” to pop a “terrorism bubble;” Ben Burgis reminds us that outside of Friedman’s own bubble, “what the bubble-bursting meant in practice was that hundreds of thousands of human beings lost their lives.”  And while Marxists like Burgis are blamed for ideological groupthink in academia, he follows Marx in challenging capitalist economics with counterargument rather than dismissal.

Friedman’s “Suck. On. This.” promptly became one of the most infamous examples of his own phraseology doing the sucking.  In 2009, The Spectator‘s Alex Massie observed that laughing at “the sheer gawd-help-us ghastliness found on the Gray Lady’s op-ed page” via Friedman was uniting the blogosphere, sharing a takedown from liberal muckraker Matt Taibbi at the alt-weekly New York Press linked by Reason libertarian Matt Welch, who in turn got it from The Atlantic‘s conservative Andrew Sullivan.

Such post-Bush unity didn’t eventually last in those publications, let alone push more editorial oversight onto Friedman.  But his assertion that “the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15” can serve to perfectly crystallize a contrasting vision of the sort of market that results when neither burgers nor bombers receive handouts.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “OPINION: Why I don’t want bad takes to go to waste” by Joel Schlosberg, The Richmond Observer [Rockingham, North Carolina], December 10, 2024

On December 1, outgoing US president Joe Biden issued a pardon for all federal crimes his son, Hunter, “has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”

Can he do that? Yes. Constitutionally, the president exercises “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”

Should he have done that? As I’ve noted before, in my opinion Biden should pardon EVERYONE convicted on unconstitutional gun and/or drugs charges, since the Constitution explicitly forbids the federal government to regulate guns and, under the Tenth Amendment, confers no authority on the federal government to regulate drugs. So those charges, at least, should never have been filed and should certainly be pardoned.

Why did he do that? While Biden the Elder correctly claims that the charges against his son were politically motivated “lawfare” aimed at using the son to damage and thwart the father, the real reason is that he IS a father.  Not many parents would, if they could prevent it, allow their children to go to prison, especially for non-violent offenses. Joe Biden just happened to have the power to prevent it. I can’t really blame him.

I’ve also argued that Biden should pardon his predecessor and successor, Donald Trump, for all the stuff he’s been accused, and even convicted, of. Since Trump is clearly going to get away with his crimes — many of them publicly confessed and even bragged about by Trump himself —  a pardon is just about the only way to officially and indelibly inscribe his guilt on the public record.

And hey, while he’s on this pardon subject, how about the rest of us?

Yes, all of us — or at least most of us.

Biden could save the taxpayers a lot of money by issuing a mass pardon for all non-violent federal crimes committed prior to the date of the pardon. Rape, murder, etc., no. Drug “crimes,” unconstitutional weapons charges, financial crimes, etc., yes.

The federal prison system would immediately be done with capacity problems, and could at least temporarily cut staff and various costs (food, medical care, etc.) in a big way.

The Department of Justice would instantly clear most of its existing case backlog, and get rid of a whole bunch of prospective future prosecutions. Some of its prosecutors could return to the private sector and those who remained could concentrate on the future and the most vile existing cases instead of chasing drug sales and small-beans embezzlement from past decades.

Have YOU committed a federal crime? Have I? Probably. There are so many laws on the books that it’s impossible to know, let alone obey, all of them.

Did you know, for example, that you can be imprisoned for up to five years and fined up to $10,000, (see 31 U.S.C. § 5111) for leaving the country with more than $5 worth of nickels?

Wouldn’t it be nice to sleep well in the knowledge that all your trivial past offenses have been erased?

Pardon us, Joe.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY