About That Assassin...

It took investigators five days to apprehend the man who assassinated United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The killer, Luigi Mangione, appears at this stage of information to be a self-professed “anti-capitalist” and likely suffering from some form of mental breakdown or illness. The murder sent shockwaves around the nation, and it also exposed some deeply troubling ugliness in many Americans.

All over social media, I see people angry at the McDonald’s employee who “narced” on the killer.

“Snitches get stitches” and all that, to the point where I fear he or she will be doxxed, harassed, or worse. All over social media, I see people callously boasting that the other health insurance CEOs out there should watch their backs.

Holy [redacted] [redacted]!, are our fellow humans actually celebrating or justifying the murder of someone because he headed up a health insurance company?

Is this a portent of what’s to come?

Are the kids who wear Che Guevara T-shirts now going to get ones with Mangione’s visage emblazoned on them?

That I’m seeing this reaction mostly from the Left reminds me of the hollowness of the Left’s assertion that they are the more moral people in our society.

Yes, heath care and health insurance in America are a giant, convoluted mess.

Yes, there are countless problems and inefficiencies, countless bad actors, and countless instances of injustice.

Yes, health insurance bosses are putting their companies’ interests first.

But, guess what? That’s their job. Health care is not a right. Nothing that involves the fruits of someone else’s labor can ever be deemed a “right,” because doing so would infringe on other people’s rights. It is a scarce resource that can be two of these three: cheap, good, prompt. Choose two, and accept that the third will not be what you desire.

I don’t assert that wrath at the system is unjustified, however, or that health care companies are angels. Far from it. Our system is an inefficient, opaque mess, and there are countless instances that are both tragic and infuriating to affirm its dysfunction. There’s plenty to be angry about.

I assert that the wrath is misplaced. Most of what’s wrong with our system traces back to government interference and distortion of the health insurance market going back eighty years, interference and distortion that began as an unintended consequence of a broader government distortion, that led to the decoupling of payer and customer, and that undermined the benefits and passive protections that market forces provide. The cascade of negative effects has spanned decades, but our public servants keep telling us that more government is the remedy to the problems caused by government.

Here is a discussion of that first distortion and its long-term effects:

Here is my prescription for starting (starting!) to fix what’s wrong with our system: