‘Universal health care’: A deadly delusion

The assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan last week is generating new headlines by the hour. The suspect in the murder – 26-year-old Luigi Mangione – was found in Pennsylvania and will likely be extradited to New York to face murder charges.

Thompson’s murder has produced shocking support for his accused killer. Insurance companies are popular targets for public vitriol generally, and not without cause. Since Thompson’s death, social media has been filled with stories of coverage for desperately needed care being denied for reasons that seem random, capricious or completely inexplicable.

Even so, it’s one thing to angrily demand corporate policy changes; it’s another thing to celebrate a man’s gangland-style execution – or call for others.

Former Washington Post writer Taylor Lorenz told Piers Morgan on his show that Thompson’s death felt “like justice” and filled her with “joy.” Lest one think that comment to be an outlier, on liberal social media site BlueSky, Lorenz criticized a recent policy announcement issued by Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, writing, “And people wonder why we want these executives dead.” (Anthem had declared that it would no longer cover the full cost of anesthesia for some surgeries; it has since retracted that statement.) In another post, Lorenz wrote, “Healthcare is a human right. We need universal healthcare now.”

Viciousness aside, it’s hard to overstate how ignorant a take this is.

If you don’t like greedy and unaccountable corporate bureaucrats deciding whether you receive health care, just wait until it is the greedy and unaccountable federal bureaucrats making those decisions. In the former case, at least you can find another job or another company. What are you going to do in the latter case? Find another government?

Advocates for “universal health care” love to use Finland as an example of a system that works. That is an absurd comparison. Finland has a culturally homogeneous population of 5.6 million; that is just over half the population of Los Angeles County (9.6 million).

Better examples are England and Canada.

England has government-funded “universal health care” in the form of the National Health Service. The population of England is around 57 million people. Wait times for nonemergency care average 14 to 18 weeks, and thousands of people have been waiting more than 18 months. As of June of this year, 7.5 million Brits were waiting for already scheduled procedures and surgeries requiring hospital stays, more than 300,000 of whom had been waiting for more than a year.

Keep in mind that these scheduled – and delayed – procedures include diagnostic tests and treatments for illnesses like cancer. Shortages of physicians and treatment facilities force cancer patients to wait weeks – or months – for radiation or chemotherapy.

These delays have life-and-death consequences. In 2009, British medical journal Lancet reported that 51.1% of British cancer patients were alive five years after their diagnosis. By contrast, 91.9% of American cancer patients were alive five years after their diagnosis.

England’s problems are not limited to cancer care. Last year, Bloomberg News published a report analyzing the NHS’s own data. The results were shocking. In most areas of England, medical care failed to meet government goals in things as basic as minimum wait times for an ambulance to arrive in an emergency (goal: 30 minutes; reality: up to three hours) or the availability of hospital beds.

In Canada – another country with “universal health care,” the situation is nearly as bad. Canada has a population of nearly 40 million. The average wait time for treatment in Canada for a condition requiring a specialist’s care is more than six months. But in some provinces and for some procedures – like orthopedic surgery or neurosurgery – the wait is closer to a year, or even longer. Canadians face long waits – six weeks to three months – even for simple but vital diagnostic procedures like MRIs, CT scans or ultrasounds.

By contrast, in the United States – a country with 330 million people – the average wait time for a nonemergency appointment with a specialist is only 26 days (a situation that medical journal STAT called “a public health crisis”). The median time between diagnosis of cancer and commencement of treatment is 27 days. The average wait time for an ambulance here is seven minutes.

Delays, personnel and facilities shortages and government revenue shortfalls in countries like England and Canada that have “universal health care” create new and more ominous hazards, when assisted suicide is legal, as it has been in Canada since 2016 and will likely be in England within the next year.

Canada’s program is called “Medical Assistance in Dying.” When initially enacted, MAID was to be limited exclusively for Canadians diagnosed with terminal illness. But in 2021, MAID was extended to cover any serious and incurable illness. In 2027, it will be further extended to Canadians dealing with mental illness.

There are even more insidious uses of the law. Earlier this year, Jacobin magazine reported that Canada now has one of the highest assisted suicide rates in the world and that MAID is being administered to people who are poor and disabled.

The inevitable trajectory of universal health care is shortages and rationing. The inevitable trajectory of legalized assisted suicide is widespread death. The two in tandem present a dystopian future.

The Netherlands, one of the first European countries to legalize assisted suicide, first lowered the age from 18 to 12 years old. In 2020, it was expanded to terminally ill children under 12 – including babies, with the parents’ consent. Belgium, which legalized assisted suicide in 2002, has no minimum age requirement.

Both countries also have “universal health care.”

Leftists like Lorenz are celebrating the killing of Thompson because the company he ran did not, in their opinion, pay for enough of their fellow citizens’ health care. But if she and others get their wish, there will be much more killing – this time, of their fellow citizens in the name of “health care.”