Peter Earle explains that “reform, not revenge, is the path to a freer, fairer healthcare market.” A slice:
No sooner did news break of the cold-blooded killer of UnitedHealth Group executive Brian Thompson than an outbreak of immoral preening did, with approval erupting across social media. Supporters of the assassin justified the act with claims that insurance companies are “murdering people” or that “corporate greed” is driving higher rates of claim denials. It’s a tremendously oversimplified narrative, fueled by ignorance, ideological fervor, and bloodthirstiness, and it blithely ignores the complexities of the healthcare system and the broader economic forces at play. The insurance industry, far from being a monolithic villain, operates within a dense web of regulatory mandates, demographic pressures, and financial realities that shape its actions. Healthcare, too, is among the most heavily regulated industries in the United States. So by reducing the issues to a battle of “greedy corporations” versus suffering patients virtually all of the root problems are ignored, and potential paths to meaningful reform unclaimed.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders also used Thompson’s murder to opine that the “anger at the healthcare industry tells us is that . . . you cannot have people in the insurance industry rejecting needed healthcare for people while they make billions of dollars in profit.”
As an explanation of Mr. Mangione’s alleged act, this is factually wrong and morally benighted. We don’t know if Mr. Mangione was denied care or even what his specific healthcare complaint was, apart from a general loathing for the system. Perhaps he blames health providers for his back pain, but that isn’t an explanation for murder.
Meanwhile, what can you do about an embarrassment like Massachusetts senator Liz Warren? (Except celebrate, if you’re a Republican.) Thankfully, I don’t have to give you a lengthy recap of her serial egregiousness because my excellent colleague Charlie Cooke laid it all out this morning with the contempt she deserves. (He even drew the same comparison with Fetterman that I do, albeit with fewer pokes at his state of dress.) The matter of direct relevance is, as Charlie described, the forever damning “but.” “Violence is never the answer, but” — and at that point you can stop talking, lady, because everything that comes afterwards betrays the falsehood of everything that came before.
I won’t repeat Charlie’s thesis, though we are in complete agreement. I felt the need to speak about it a second time, however, because, like him, I found Warren’s act to be particularly vile even for a bitterly shell-shocked, endlessly degraded era of political morality as is late 2024. It is the cynical use of the killing as political leverage that betrays a monstrously instrumentalist soul underlying that superciliously lecturing tone of hers. Like most leftist academics, she sees a human tragedy as a teaching moment — to teach her values, ones that she herself played no small role in helping to falsely impart to the killer. I normally can talk a mean line when it comes to politicians whom I find contemptible, but I lack the vocabulary to fully explain how antihuman I find what Warren said was — the way she views the world, as revealed by statements like this. Her statement reflects perhaps the worst of our politics precisely because it adopts that gently coercive tone ubiquitous to the modern progessive elite, lecturing us about the need to “learn the right lesson from this.”
No, Senator Warren: The right lesson to take from Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson is — as John Fetterman was happy to point out — that Luigi Mangione is a mentally disturbed, cold-blooded murderer. There is no further lesson to learn. One Democrat understands this, instantly; another one does not.
Jack Nicastro criticizes the U.S. Supreme Court for punting on a racial-discrimination case.
Federal courts have repeatedly affirmed that the Citizenship Clause means what it says. In US v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), the Supreme Court ruled that a man born in the United States to Chinese parents was a US citizen — even though his parents had left the United States after passage of the racist Chinese Exclusion Act, which made it illegal for migrants from China to become naturalized citizens. Federal prosecutors tried to argue that birthright citizenship didn’t include Wong, and that since his parents were Chinese, he was too.
The Supreme Court shot them down. “In clear words and in manifest intent,” Justice Horace Gray wrote for the 6-2 majority, the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship “includes the children born, within the territory of the United States, of all other persons, of whatever race or color.” The only babies born on American soil who aren’t entitled to automatic citizenship are those whose parents are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of US law, namely foreign diplomats or soldiers of an invading enemy in wartime.
A lapsing of Ms. McFerran’s term will end a bad streak of NLRB decisions. The board has overturned a ruling that shielded workers from harassment and made it possible to force workers into a union without a majority vote by secret ballot. A continuing case against Amazon CEO Andy Jassy could bar companies from warning employees about the potential negative effects of unionizing.
[DBx: My late father – who dropped out of school after the sixth grade and spent most of his life working as a pipefitter in a shipyard – had the natural good sense to oppose each of the many efforts that was made during his career to unionize the shipyard at which he worked. He quite correctly never saw himself as oppressed or cheated by his employer, and, therefore, he never perceived any practical or ethical merit in labor unions.]
Medicaid and Medicare are the source of at least $100 billion a year in fraud and over $100 billion annually in improper payments. Obviously, ending fraud should be a priority. And according to the Government Accountability Office, 74% of improper payments are simple overpayments. However, the government is making little effort to recover the funds.
