Timothy Birdnow

Here is a story aboutt Luigi Mangione and his manifesto and other documents.

I won't summarize; you can read it for yourself. I just wanted to comment on one or two items.

First, the kid had a complete temper tantrum when being brought into his court hearing. He complained "it's totally unfair". Unfair? Isn't shooting a man in the back unfair? If he had any balls he would have given his victim a gun, or a knife and used a knife himself so there was a fair fight.

This only proves what an entitled, spoiled brat Mangione is.

Second, there is this little bit of horsepoop promoted by the leftist Daily Beast when discussing Mangione's hatred of health insurance companies:

"It claimed that the United States had the 'most expensive healthcare system in the world,' but blasted the system for making America only the 42nd in life expectancy.

According to the most recent data published by the World Health Organization in 2020 found that life expectancy in the US was 78-and-a-half years for both men and women - ranking it 40th compared to other countries.

A 2023 report by the World Economic Forum also found that the US had the most expensive healthcare compared to other mostly Western countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

It reported that Americans were spending an estimated $12,318 per person in 2021, compared to $7,383 spent per person in Germany, the second most expensive system."

end

Notice this comes from the intenational socialist World Economic Forum.

But it in no way asks WHY and assumes the cause is greedy health insurance companies. But is it.

IF this data is correct (and I rather suspect not but am not going to waste a large amount of time digging for better data) one must ask why Canadians,with their wonderful free healthcare, come here for treatment on a regular basis. And it comes back to the dirty little secret - America is chock full of Third World immigrants, both legal and illegal, coming from nations where people die at an early age from diseases that are treatable.

America currently has sixty million aliens, legal and illegal, residing here. In other words we have a Third World nation hidden inside of the First World America. Many of the legals get decent healthcare, no doubt, but the illegals almost all do not go for care except when the must, and then it's to the emergency room.

The diseases they bring with them, and the damage to their bodies from their past lives, guarantees early senescence and death. And it is THEY who drive the life expectancy down.

Ditto with the black community, where many of the black folks don't go to doctors out of fear of some sort of genocide as many in their community paranoidly believe.

Also, life expectancy is dragged down through death by violence. Both the Hispanic community and the African American community suffers from that particular malady. Crime, my friends, leads America to a lower life expectancy. The people blaming insurance companies for that are the same folks who won't take criminals off the streets.

One must ask, too, why it's more expensive to get healthcare coverage in America. Well, for starters, the U.S. government makes these companies cover everyone regardless of their health status, which means they have to charge the rest of their customers more. It is illegal to deny coverage.

In Germany and the other European nations they have government run healthcare systems and so their population pays less AT THE SERVICE PROVIDER but pays more in taxes. And of course they don't have to pay much for national defense, something costing America and arm and a leg as we not only protect ourselves but much of the world and that means our taxes are rather high.

We have far superior health care, as that business about Canadians coming here proves.

I would add our current system is broken indeed, but who broke it? Mostly it was the government, going all the way back to FDR.

FDR started the employer-based healthcare system in America. He pushed taxes up so high on income that employers began offering compensation in other ways, ways not taxed. One such form of compensation was health insurance for their workers. It was cheap then. But it became the standard for obtaining insurance and the insurance companies worked it out so there were groups - usually companies - where the price was tied to the amount of money coming in from that group and the amount being handed out as benefits. Small businesses paid a lot more for insurance than big corporations as a result. You also had labor unions forming enormous groups which favored this approach.

Then came Medicare, which was a disaster for medical prices. Now the government was setting prices by refusing to pay market rates, and demanding companies lose money by following a schedual of compensation. These companies aren't in business to lose money; they simply raised prices to cover their losses. Hospitals too raised prices because the insurance companies always tried to lowball them - and because the government made them treat patients who couldn't pay. So they jacked up the rates to cover their losses elsewhere.

It's been on an upward trajectory ever since. And the solution the Left and our government has always turned to is more of the same, more government intervention, larger, more expansive medical alliances, etc. Consolidation and more government regulation just drove prices upward and care down.

At any rate we now have a quasi-government payer program thanks to Obama and it only metastasized the problem and eliminated competition. Most doctors are now part of these big healthcare corporations; the independent doctor is a rare critter indeed, and endangered species. And now all doctors are specialists because that is the only way they can make enough money to pay off their student loans. And pay their malpractice insurance, which has gone through the roof thanks to the big trial lawyers chasing million dollar malpractice cases. And THAT was another thing empowered by our government.

But nobody wants to talk about any of that, or look at the obvious which is that private market insurance would actually bring prices down and care up. We do not have a free market-based system,but a voluntary socialism, a socialism akin to Nazi economics.

It's called corporatism.

Look, I hate these big insurance companies as much as anyone. Anthem Blue Cross wanted to let me die from heart failure, and I do mean that. They refused to cover a lifevest, which is a gadget designed to restart your heart if it stops (and mine was about to stop). They said it was "not medically necessary" because they only approe it in cases of people waiting to get pacemaker/defibrilators installed and I was not eligible for one because they require "six months of careful study" before they will implant one. So I was supposed to wait six months when my heart was on the verge of stopping. May as well just tell me "go away and die already".

I appealed to the State of Missouri and went through arbitration. The arbitrator heard my side of the story and read their letter to me. Her exact words were "Oh MY God!" She couldn't believe how callous and idiotic they were. I won the case and got my $12,000 bill payed.

I've had many other problems with them.

So I don't have any love for these companies, but you cannot lay the blame for this solely on them; much of it is a case of very bad public policy, policy promoted by the Left, by The Daily Beast types.

Mangione could have taken action against these companies, sure, but legal action. More importantly he could have promoted free market competition - the best, quickest way to reform the system.

Corporations do what they do for a reason. Generally money is made by serving the public, but with these big corporations and with America's health care system money is to be made by pleasing government and the providers and not the patient. The patient isn't the customer, even though he's the one sending in money. They rightly see the patient as a captive market with no choice. That is what is wrong with the system; the only way these companies make money (their primary purpose for existing) is to treat the patient like a ward of the system and not a paying customer. They WANT few companies in any given market so they can make their profits and not have to worry about pleasing the patients. Competition would force them to be more responsive to the public.

But guys like Mangione and the folks at Daily Beast want to move in the exact opposite direction.

I remember a sketch by the good folks at Monty Python's Flying circus back in the '70's where a patient had turned into a skeleton while waiting to see a doctor at a British Health Service hospital. They saw back then how this worked. We should have listened to the good folks at Monty Python.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 12:01 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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