By Chris Powell
The assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan on Dec. 4 has sparked political hysteria, most of all from Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy.
In a video he posted on social media two weeks later, citing the assassination, Murphy, a Democrat re-elected in November, turned vulgar, asserting that the medical insurance industry “mostly doesn’t give a —-” about sick people and that people are angry about their coverage.
If new oversight committee is serious, where should it begin?
Supporting illegal immigration, Connecticut’s left cuts wages
Rell’s capital went unspent; and choices take courage
The senator added: “The business model of the health care industry is to deny care to people who need it and force them into bankruptcy, or, worse, let them die in order to grow profit.”
Is Thompson’s assassination really evidence for these accusations?
The country and the senator have just come through a heated political campaign in which medical insurance was hardly mentioned. Opinion polls about the issues most on people’s minds cited inflation, illegal immigration, and government’s strange enthusiasm for transgenderism. Medical insurance didn’t even make the list. Flawed as the medical insurance system may be, most people seem satisfied with what they have, especially government employees like the senator, whose policies are gold-plated.
Of course insurers make money by economizing with claims, not by overpaying, and some claims always will be matters of judgment and some judgments may be cruel and corrupt. (Meanwhile government’s business model often seems to be to waste as much money as possible, knowing that, no matter how inefficient, government is forever.)
Their burgeoning welfare state is conditioning Americans to think that someone else should pay for everything they want, but until people are angels, insurance will remain a racket in which providers, policyholders, and their lawyers scheme to beat each other out of every cent possible.
In any case Connecticut remains home to a large medical insurance industry, and United Healthcare has offices in a skyscraper in Hartford emblazoned with the company’s name. Yet as he sought re-election Murphy led no protest march there.
If United Healthcare and other medical insurers in Connecticut have really been cheating their customers to death, during his campaign Murphy did not lecture them and their thousands of employees about how despicable they are. Indeed, he probably got most of their votes. Now they’re the big problem.
Any such lecture from the senator might have caused him to be questioned about how exactly medical insurance should be changed.
In the past Murphy has spoken favorably about expanding Medicare, the government medical insurance for the elderly, to all people who might want it in place of ever-more-expensive employer-provided group insurance or individual insurance. But in his social media hysteria the other day the senator offered no alternative.
Medicare is popular with its recipients because it is not just a cost-shifting system, as most insurance is, but a system of generational cost shifting from the old and mostly retired to the young and mostly employed. Since nearly everyone will go through those stages of life, this cost shifting seems fair to most people.
But Medicare shifts costs in another big way. It underpays medical providers and expects them to recover the underpayments by overcharging other patients, insured or uninsured. Underpayments by Medicaid, government’s insurance for the indigent and those nearly indigent, are even worse, and it is often hard for Medicaid recipients to find doctors willing to treat them.
So to whom would costs be shifted under “Medicare for all,” if not to the inflation under which everyone is already chafing and to the foreigners who are already buying fewer U.S. government bonds so as not to pay as much for the goodies Americans claim and then presume to charge to the world?
Murphy’s social media hysteria was ironic in another respect. He said, “People in America today feel ignored, they feel scared, they feel alone, feel that the system intentionally grinds them down.”
Just a few weeks earlier he was urging people to give another presidential term to his party, which was telling them they never had it so good even as they were being ground down all along.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 