The outpouring of hatred for Brian Thompson, a hardworking man born in the heartland who worked his way up the economic ladder from an anything-but-upper-class boyhood, who was murdered (allegedly) by Luigi Mangione, a fabulously wealthy, spoiled, drug-using rich kid, has been shocking, to say the least. It speaks to a moral vacuum among a large segment of the American population.

However, there is undoubtedly a problem with how our healthcare system works. The same leftists who are cheering on Thompson’s murder (and seem completely unperturbed by the fact that it was carried out using what I believe is an illegally created gun) insist that their delight in a man’s death is because we don’t have socialized medicine. If we had socialized medicine, they argue, he wouldn’t have died, and they wouldn’t have had to be happy.

I argue the opposite, which is that we already have a semi-socialized system because it is perverted at all levels by the government. And even when the government isn’t perverting it, other factors destroy anything like a free market in healthcare.

In this podcast, I detail what I believe are the eight factors that explain America’s soaring healthcare costs. At the end of the video, I look briefly at the two alternatives for fixing it: Total government control versus the free market.

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Transcript

ANDREA: Hey, all. This is Andrea Widburg, managing editor at American Thinker. I have been trying for several days to put together a post about Brian Thompson’s murder. He is the healthcare CEO who had… was executed cold blood, and his alleged killer, Luigi Magione, is being hailed as a folk hero. And what I want to talk about is everything that’s wrong with our healthcare system and why all those people who are attacking the insurers are attacking the messengers, not the problem. So, without further ado.

You are already familiar with the bare bones of the story. On December 4th, Brian Thompson, who is a- was, sorry, CEO of United Healthcare, was murdered in cold blood. The police has since arrested Luigi Mangione who is a young man who came from a very rich background, who did not have healthcare from United Healthcare, who suffered a devastating spinal cord or back injury in a surfing accident, suffered from chronic pain, seems to have experimented with psychotropic drugs to deal with the pain and his misery, and, most significantly, to my mind, even though he’s 26 now, graduated some time ago. Went to UPenn. Which is a hotbed of hard leftism. One of the instructors was celebrating Brian Thompson’s death and when her job seemed to be at risk, issued a manifestly fake apology as any. She mouthed the words but didn’t get the feeling her heart was in it. So, the response from the Great American Public was shocking, at least amongst leftists who celebrated Thompson’s death because insurers deny claims, and people suffer. And I’m not denying that insurers deny claims or that people suffer. I do not think that murder is the answer to reforming the system. And that’s what I wanted to talk about; the problems inherent in the system. However, I do want to note that that on this particular screen, if you’re watching the video, you see a screengrab from Wikipedia. The Killing of Brian Thompson. What’s fascinating about the screengrab has still images of the shooting, it has mps, it has Luigi Mangione’s booking photo. It has no photo of Brian Thompson, the man who was murdered. He has been de-personed. And I found that rather shocking and surprising. Anyway, on with the story.

This story has to start with the story of health insurance in America itself. Now, the nature of insurance, which you all know, is that it’s meant to insure against something catastrophic. For example, if you have car insurance, it doesn’t pay for your oil changes or for you to check your tires or to do any of your maintenance. But if you get in a car crash, or, as just happened to me the other day, someone scrapes your bumper in the parking lot, grr, if it’s a bad enough claim that you don’t want to pay out-of-pocket, you can go to your insurer. Now the insurer has been taking your insurance money and the insurance money of all the other people for such an eventuality. It’s a gamble on both sides. You’re hoping you don’t have to file a claim, they’re hoping you don’t file a claim. But if you do file a claim, they have to pay because they took your money with the promise that if something bad happened, they’d be there for you. And of course later they’ll raise your premiums, but that’s a different story altogether. Health insurance initially started that way. I, growing up in the ‘60s, still remember that health insurance was for when bad things happen. If someone got appendicitis, some things like that. And, this little snippet from the Permanente Journal discusses the start of health care, especially employer health care, which is really an important factor, in America. And I do not pretend to be a scholar on this, but I do know sort-of the basic outlines. It’s from the Permanente Journal and I’ll get back to that because that kind-of matters. And what Michael J. Pentecost writes is that 

“President Roosevelt’s dream of a national health insurance program [which was part of his New Deal which was pure progressive socialism] was never realized as the next decade [i.e., that would be 1940’s] brought World War II and a severe domestic labor shortage. The resultant inflation spawned wage controls and, to remain competitive, employers offered health insurance as a substitute for salary increases.”

So, this is why we have employer health insurance. It is a residue of World War II when employers were competing for employees, so they offered “we’ll help pay for your health care in case of a catastrophe”. And then the essay continues, I’m quoting again:

“That precedent and a post-war economic boom contributed to enormous growth in employer-based health insurance. Between 1940 and 1950, the number of Americans with such coverage grew from 21 million to 142 million.

In 1954, the pre-eminence of employer-provided health coverage was further cemented by the Internal Revenue Service decision confirming the tax deductibility of such premiums. A tax break, a popular employee benefit, a distinguishing feature in recruitment and retention… all at a modest cost. What was not to like for American business?”

So, there you have it. Now, the fact that it’s from the Permanente Journal is interesting because that is Kaiser Permanente. This is a journal that is part of the whole Kaiser Foundation. I have been a Kaiser member since 1991. I love Kaiser. Some people analogize it to socialized medicine because when you’re a member of Kaiser you get what you need when you need it. But of course it’s a voluntary association. It’s not coming from the government and it is still run as a business. But what makes Kaiser unique and very efficient is that it has everything in-house. It’s not too buffeted by market sources. By market forces. These physicians are paid a salary and it is not as high as it would get in free-market if they were, for example, orthopedic surgeons or something, but the exchange is a very supportive infrastructure, a still extremely good salary, protection from malpractice suits which are part of what drove up costs to such a crazy extent, and, also the benefit of having all the systems in place. The great thing about Kaiser is that it’s a single entity. It can afford all the equipment, all the testing machines. And I will get back to that in a minute, too.

So, now we’ve got the history of how we ended up with employer insurance. The next thing is, how did costs get so high?

The reason this is a podcast and not a post is because even though I’m not an expert and don’t pretend to know it all, I do know a fair bit about how the medical industry works for various reasons that I won’t go into but I do have some sort of insider information and, of course, I’ve just paid attention for the last forty years and I’m old enough to have seen many systems come and go. So what I’ve got is a list of main reasons for insanely high health care costs. And I will try to go through them fairly quickly, but if this were an essay it would be a 3,000 or 8,000-word essay, which is why I’ve chosen a podcast. 

The first reason, which those of us who are fairly old remember, was malpractice lawsuits. They drove up malpractice insurance rates. Doctors charged more to give themselves a buffer. Their insurance rates went crazy, so they charged more for the insurance rates. The whole thing was just whack-a-doodle. So, I’m not going to discuss that anymore, just to put it out there now, but it was one of the factors behind rising health care costs. The other factors I’ll each give their own little analysis, so I’m going to go through this list fairly quickly.

The next one is the changing nature of medicine. Medicine is simply more high tech than it used to be and people discount how costly that is. After that comes government intervention in the form of Medicare and Medicaid as well as all sorts of state programs, ad those seriously pervert the market and drive up prices. Insurance, more market perversion. Government regulations, way more than you realize, even more market perversion. The requirement to treat, and that is because of the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which applies to any hospital that accepts Medicare and Medicaid, which means all hospitals. And this requirement to treat, I can also discuss this with a fair amount of knowledge that most people don’t have. Obamacare, which shifted insurance from being insurance to become simply a cost-shifting mechanism which doesn’t work and drives up costs. And finally, the burden of illegal aliens on our health care system. So I will get to all of these in more detail in… as this goes on.

Item number two on the list of increasing costs in health care is the changing nature of medicine. If you’re watching this video, what you see on your screen is a two-part picture. On the left, you have a doctor in a man’s living room and the doctor is holding his little black bag. And on the right, you have an MRI machine. And those two pictures sum up one of the reasons medicine is more expensive. In the old days, the doctor had in his little black bag some nasty looking knives, thread and sutures, pills, a stethoscope. It was really the old days. Some leeches, things to bleed you. That was what he had. And he had his knowledge, which didn’t come from a medical school. Probably he was a journeyman who had studied with another doctor. He might’ve gone to a medical school but there’s only so much you can learn in the old days when your remedies are leeches and a stethoscope. Doctors were actually really good in those days at diagnosing things that they knew about, but there wasn’t a lot they could do. Everything changed in the modern age. The doctor doesn’t have a bag. He has a lab. He has a bazillion dollar pharmaceutical industry behind him. He has surgery. He has insanely complicated testing and treatment equipment. We do things now that are unimaginable, were unimaginable in history. We replace people’s hearts and their kidneys and their livers. And these are ordinary surgeries and they are insanely expensive and we won’t even get into the drug company profits, which is where the profits in medicine really lies now. This goes back to one of the reasons Kaiser works, because it has its costs in one place. There is one MRI machine in the Kaiser hospital and all the doctors have access to it. And it is one cost, but these machines cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and that’s not even the maintenance price. The only thing that will drive all these costs down is market forces. And that is the one thing we do not have in our medical system. We don’t really have a socialized medical system. We have the worst of all possible worlds, which is a bureaucratized, regulated, government-controlled, non-socialized non-market system. So anyway, one of the reasons it’s so expensive, it’s not the doctor’s little black bag anymore.

The third reason for very high health care costs is Medicare and Medicaid. And the theory is that they bring costs down, and certainly for those who benefit from them they do keep people from paying the costs of Medicare and Medicaid and related state programs pay. But they are complete perversions of the marketplace because, for example, Medicare covers 80% of not expenses, but approved expenses. They also, these programs set the prices they’re willing to pay for certain things. But what the bureaucracy sets and what the marketplace requires are two different things. So doctors will often keep driving up prices to increase their percentage paid by the government. And, when those prices get very high, that gets passed onto the insurance companies and there’s another game played there, too. And it gets passed on to those who have to pay the remaining 10, 20, 30, whatever, 50 percent. And so it keeps escalating prices, hospitals and doctors, which have their own expenses, infrastructure, insanely high infrastructure expenses because of the rising cost of medicine because of how technical and how changed medicine is and because of malpractice and because of rising rents and because of inflation. And meanwhile, the government, the federal and the state government sit there doling out pennies on the dollar. So, the more the government imposes itself on the marketplace, the more the marketplace will try to compensate in other ways, and that’s always going to drive up costs.

The fourth factor behind rising costs is insurance. We’ve come a long way since the basic insurance, which was for emergency treatments. That existed in the 40’s and 50’s and into the 60’s. And insurance is an easy target for the leftists because it’s the only for-profit aspect of this, other than the doctors themselves. And leftists don’t want to do away with doctors, they want to do away with these nasty insurance companies. Well, one of these things is that insurance companies aren’t actually that profitable. Again, if you want the real profit, you get the drug companies which keep making more and more drugs that on the one hand, sometimes legitimately and wonderfully cure things and are great, and on the other hand are unnecessary and create their own class of problems and are always expensive. So, different subject altogether although as I said, rising drug costs certainly contribute to the cost of medicine. But one of the things I want to talk about insurance, and this is before we get to how Obamacare affected it, is the fact that insurance inherently perverts the market. And this wasn’t the case when you went to the hospital and just emergency need an appendectomy and the insurance paid for it. That was it. But what’s happened now is that insurance pays for a lot of things, and it did even before Obamacare. It started paying for more and more cost-shifting things. But the main thing about insurance is that it perverts the arms-length transaction of the free market. And it means that the customer doesn’t care about the price. And I have my own anecdote on this, which has always fascinated me. I’ve been a Kaiser patient since 1991. I love Kaiser. It’s in-house. It does preventative treatment because it’s figured out that for it, preventative treatment saves money. If it can catch someone’s cancer in the early phases, it’s more affordable than catching it later. It’s just smart for Kaiser, and Kaiser is smart for me.  But I am a tooth-grinder from way back, and I finally got someone to prescribe a night guard for me. And at that time, Kaiser handled it. The way it worked, this was back in the 90’s, is that Kaiser didn’t measure or create night guards. It would sent you to a third-party provider orthodontist. And the orthodontist didn’t even make the night guard. I had to pay the lab cost, which even back then was high, I think it’s like 300 dollars in the mid-1990’s. But it did pay the orthodontist. And, so I go to the orthodontist, I see him for two seconds. I see a lab tech for twenty minutes because they didn’t have quick-dry molds in those days. She… not a lab tech, but an orthodontic tech, she put the mold in my mouth and I had to sit there for twenty minutes with that nasty stuff oozing down my throat, then I shook hands with everybody and left. I came back two weeks later and they had the night guard. They fitted it on me, the orthodontist came in, checked it here and there, filed things off, and I went home. The total time there was probably thirty minutes. The total time with the orthodontist was probably five minutes. And I later sought what the orthodontist billed Kaiser. 795 dollars. And Kaiser, because it really wasn’t in the business of this kind of thing, simply paid the whole bill. That was insane and obscene. Had I been the person paying for this, I would have known the price up front, I might have negotiated the price, I would have shopped around for a better price, but this guy charged 795 dollars. And the reason he did, he wasn’t even a crook. What he was used to was dealing with insurance other than Kaiser. And the other insurers probably paid him 30 cents on the dollar. So 30 cents… 30 percent of 795 was what he needed to earn a profit on his services. And he needs a profit. He earned the profit for his services and he paid for an office, he paid the technicians, he paid for his insurance, so totally appropriate. But 795 was the number he’d come up with to bill any insurance company so that at the end of the day, they’d refuse to pay most of it, he would still take a profit home. But because I was going through Kaiser, I saw what he billed, and they actually paid it off.  But what that taught me then was that the insurance market is completely perverse, and it drives up costs because there is no arms-length negotiation between a rolling buyer and a rolling seller. And admittedly, in the insurance area, you can’t always have that. When you’re in a small town, there’s one doctor, maybe one hospital. When there’s an emergency, you go to the nearest ER. So there are limitations on the free market negotiation. But most certainly, the intervention of the insurance company perverts the free market. It does so very badly.

The fifth reason health care is so expensive is regulations. At the time of the Obamacare debates, someone who knew the California health care market told me that California doctors and hospitals were subject to over one thousand regulations. Now I am going to be the first to admit that I do not mind some government intervention from minimal standards. For example, in San Francisco, it has long made sense to me that building codes required certain basic standards to protect against the hazard of earthquakes. When you don’t have those standards, you have what happened in Mexico City or what routinely happen in places like Pakistan or China or Iran where an earthquake strikes and every single building collapses like a pancake, killing thousands and tens of thousands of people. There are, when you have some government regulations controlling how preschools should be set up, for example. There are sensible regulations. I don’t mind certain building codes. I do mind, for example, the fact that I used to be affiliated with a school, that when they remodeled and put in a mandatory wheelchair ramp. Again, wheelchair ramps aren’t such a bad idea. There may not be many people with wheelchairs, but there are a heck of a lot of women with strollers. And strollers use wheelchair ramps, too, so not whining about that. The wheelchair ramp that was ultimately built was a quarter inch too narrow. Quarter inch! And they didn’t meet the code, had to be torn out and rebuilt at great expense, which the contractor paid and had to pass onto his insurer, it was the whole megillah, it was ridiculous. So, regulations have to be sensible. But regulations cannot go overboard. I don’t know why it is, but at the time California had over a thousand regulations, I was told that Texas had something close to half that number. And I was not reading in the newspapers that Texas was having twice as many catastrophic medical outcomes because it did not have enough regulations. Regulations cost money. And one of the things I do happen to know is that electronic medical records, which were required under Obamacare, and which can be pretty darn cool and very helpful, are also one of the main costs of implementing electronic medical record programs is to make them comply, or at least in the early years of EMRs, was to make to make them comply with the various state and local regulations governing because it was every aspect of an EMR for a vast hospital network or something, had to accommodate a thousand regulations. And it was utterly insane. Again, sensible regulations I think most of us can get on board with. Bureaucrats run amok, which they tend to do in places like Massachusetts and California and Oregon, I mean Democrat states, not so much. And they drive up costs.

[Requirement to Treat was skipped].

And then there is Obamacare, which caused insurance premiums to triple or more for most people. I drive five and a half hours for my medical care because I have an affordable policy five and a half hours away, and if I were to get insurance where I live, it would cost me 18,000 a year. And at that point, it’s just cheaper for me to husband my money, I hope I don’t get really sick! So, I travel now, waiting for when I turn 65 and can turn on the government tap because that’s how perverted our system is. What I’m simply going to do for Part One of my Obamacare discussion is read from Ann Coulter, because she says that the problem isn’t insurance, and it’s certainly not poor, departed, murdered Brian Thompson, a man who worked his way up from a small town and became a corporate executive in a legal business, and a law-abiding business, whether or not people like it. Anyway, I’m just going to read from Ann, because it’s amazing. She’s so good at this kind of thing. 

“We were promised that under Obamacare, everyone would have affordable, quality healthcare. Not a dime would be added to the deficit, premiums would go down. You could keep your health insurance if you liked it. You could keep your doctor if you liked him. And it all came true. Except for those last five things.” And that was me. That was a five-item list. 

“Premiums went through the roof because Democrats mandated that among other things, that insurance companies cover an array of exotic medical treatments popular with their base: e.g., men who think they’re women, people who can’t figure out how to use a condom, drug addicts, day drinkers, people who bring their emotional support Shetland ponies on airplanes and so on. You know why it took 90 days to get approval for treating your baby’s brain tumor? Your insurance company was tapped out, after paying for thousands upon thousands of transgender surgeries, as mandated by the Democrats. Now, if your baby wanted to trade his penis for a make-believe vagina, well, now you’re talking. No matter how sure you are that you’re never going to need your penis cut off in order to “change genders”, Democrats decided you should not be allowed to buy a health insurance plan that fails to cover penis-chopping along with dozens of associated avant-garde procedures. Here are just a few of the covered services expressly for transgenders listed on United Healthcare’s webpage: Bilateral mastectomy or breast reduction. Breast augmentation with breast implants or fat transfer. Clitoroplasty, that’s creation of clitoris. Hysterectomy, removal of uterus. Labiaplasty, creation of labia. Laser electrolysis hair removal in advance of genital reconstruction. Metoidialplasty, creation of penis using clitoris. Orchiectomy, removal of testicles. Penectomy, removal of penis. Penile prosthesis, phalloplasty, creation of penis. Salpingouforectomy, removal of fallopian tubes and ovaries. Scrotoplassty, creation of scrotum.  Testicular prosthesis, thyroid cartilage reduction, reduction cartilage thyroplasty tracheal shave. Removal or reduction of the Adam’s apple.”

Okay, this is me again for a sec. Some of these things are necessary for people who have had cancer and had to have organ genitals removed, or have been in car accidents or whatever. But Ann Coulter said very carefully that these are all cosmetic procedures for people who have so-called transgenderism. Going back to Ann.

“The list goes on for a full page. Surely, you didn’t imagine that your health insurer would pay for all that, plus grandma’s Parkinson’s. On the other hand, if grandma’s Alzheimer’s makes her think she might be a man, she’s covered. It’s always the same thing with Democrats. Yeah, it was hard work, but we finally passed a bill to force people to pay for someone else. Now we’ll go accept congratulations from the special pleaders. Obamacare is a welfare program for people with freakish sexual predilections. Except that instead of being funded with tax revenue, it’s funded with our insurance premiums. The middle class pays through the nose for health insurance in order to enable insurance companies to comply with a preposterous array of government mandates and regulations.”

There’s more in the Ann Coulter essay, but that was the nub of it, and she’s absolutely nailed it. And now I’ll go on to the next problem with Obamacare. There are a bazillion problems with Obamacare, and this is why I will never forgive John McCain, who out of petty spite, because Donald Trump hurt his feelings, left us stuck with it. Just as Roberts gets to blame, and, of course, every Democrat. But those two ostensible conservatives because they knew better and they had their own petty reasons for shivving the American people. But on to the second problem with Obamacare.

Part Two of the Obamacare problem, which is obvious to me, and as I said, there are a bazillion reasons Obamacare has driven up costs. We just spoke about what Ann Coulter spoke about which is Obamacare has simply become a cost-shifting mechanism, not an insurance mechanism, and that it is especially a cost-shifting mechanism for diseases of the left, so to speak. But the other thing that I see with Obamacare was a fundamental problem with Obamacare altogether. And it’s what I call ‘the stoner problem’. If you’re watching the video, there’s a very funny picture on the screen right now of two hippos on a couch, a flower-patterned couch, and in front of them is another hippo with a wreath on its- her head smoking a pot. And the prompt I gave to Grok, X’s very good AI image generator, is that I wanted a picture of three old hippies sitting in a living room smoking pot. And he decided to give me a picture of three hippos I just thought was very funny and included it. So, this is again something where I have some insider knowledge. A very dear friend of mine is an old hippie. And she lives in a world of old and young hippies. In other words, I went through, you know, I did the “go to college, go to grad school, get the law degree, get a career, get married to someone who was also a professional, have children within marriage”, the whole traditional pathway to a good life. My friend, whom I’ve known since childhood, chose the hippie route. And my friend is not unhappy with her life choices. And she’s a dear friend. We speak often. So I get an insight into her life. All of their friends are stoners. Every last one. And all of them are people who regardless of their innate talents have flatlined in life. And this is why I despise pot, and agree with Elton John that legalizing it is an enormous, enormous mistake. Because it turns out that the opiate of the people is an opiate! It makes people flat and apathetic and her friends aren’t crazy, she and her friends aren’t crazy, they’re, aside from smoking pot, they’re not into crime. They’re just useless, people who have wasted their gifts. What they want is enough money to have a roof on their head, food in their belly, and pot. And many of them are also beer drinkers. So they want a minimal lifestyle. And one of the things about Obamacare is it was done by upper-middle class people who operated on the premise that everybody would be willing to pay some money to get the equivalent of middle and upper-middle class health care. And this premise was completely and totally wrong. Because there are vast numbers of Americans, more than anybody in DC knows, who do not want to pay extra money when, thanks to that Emergency Treatment Act, they can go to the ER and treat it as their physician. So they know that no matter what’s wrong with them, they go to the ER and they get treated for free. And as one of my friends said, explicitly, “why should I pay 50 dollars a month,” which is 600 dollars a year, which is 600 dollars you don’t have for pot or alcohol, she didn’t say that part, she just said, “why should I pay 50 dollars a month when I could go to the ER and get treated for free?” And there you have it. That is the “old hippie problem”. There are a bunch of people who didn’t want to buy into Obamacare, so the entire premise of Obamacare was false. And all these people who are just still going to the Emergency Room and getting free treatment, so on the one hand you have Obamacare with its massive market perversion driving up prices by forcing us to pay for people who are getting weird treatments, and on the other hand, the entire cohort of people who were supposed to be protected by Obamacare, or a large part of that cohort, never wanted it in the first place. So, Obamacare is the greatest, most destructive, most fraudulent market perversion of all. And, now I’ll get to the last point about all these, the requirement to treat and the people who are not getting Obamacare, so let me get to the very last fact.

The last factor, as far as I’m concerned, in the insanely high cost of medical care, is the fact that illegal aliens are covered under the 1986 Emergency Treatment Act. Just as these old hippies use the ER as their doctor’s office, so do many, some all, of the roughly 21 million illegal aliens in America. The hospitals cannot require- inquire into their immigration status and must treat them. A friend of mine who lives up in central Oregon, we’re not talking Portland, thought… the doctor thought she was having a stroke now, let me say right away she was not having a stroke, so all’s well that ends well. She spent seven hours waiting to get a scan for a suspected stroke. Now, they did give her an aspirin, just in case there really was a stroke. Seven hours, she said she was the only person in the Emergency Room speaking English. Our country is being flooded by people who are getting free care. And in California, they’re now being part of the whole Medical process, I mean, the insanity of the Democrats. This is Cloward-Piven stuff. This is not just inviting any- giving illegal aliens an incentive to come to this country, but this is a deliberate ploy to break our healthcare system. To make it collapse under its own weight. This is a Cloward-Piven idea. You collapse the systems and then you pave the way for socialism. So, where does that leave us?

At this point, of course, the question is, where do we go from here? What the Left desperately wants is socialized medicine, or single-payer, or whatever other euphemism they have. Which is that the government controls all medical care. And they envision this as a shiny, glorious, clean, perfect system where everybody is treated, “to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability”. And they will probably point to 1950’s Britain as the example of the wonders of health care. Already when I was living in England, the very beginning of the 80’s, the system was breaking down for the same reason, I forget which, what was it, Number Two, which is that medicine changed. It got more expensive because we went beyond the contents of the doctor’s black bag. Also, Europe was having, was not doing so well. England wasn’t doing so well economically then. Of course, Europe really started to fall down when the Cold War ended and we stopped funding their military. The reason, I always told this to my mother’s European friends who were so boastful of how great their system was, I said “your system is so great because we Americans are paying for it. We subsidize you. Our system is less great because your system is more great.” And they took great umbrage at that, but in fact, I was correct. And when the Cold War ended, and we started pulling money out, their systems had problems. And now you have England, which is advancing euthanasia, and which was caught not treating elderly patients and which routinely rations care because that’s the reality. Of all things. The only thing that is not rationed is air. Even water is rationed because if you want to have clean water as opposed to dirty water, you have to do something with it. And what you do with it is you treat it, and treatment costs money. Everything is rationed because ultimately everything requires money, and/or labor. And remember that money is just a way of paying for someone else’s labor. And the way socialized medicine rations, because the government does not love you, and the government has total control, is it provides less and less care. And so there was that infamous 2003 or whatever study that came out of the World Health Organization that said America had one of the worst medical programs in America, but it was Scott Atlas who later… let me try this again. America had one of the worst medical programs in the world, but Scott Atlas, who later also spoke out against the COVID regulations and the insanity of COVID, pointed out in this great commentary study that the WHO study was the worst thing ever, because if you looked at the numbers, and the devil is always in the details, what the study looked at was access to medical care. And so what it meant is that in countries with socialized medicine, you could see a doctor. It didn’t say how long you’d have to wait to see a doctor, and it didn’t say whether you would actually get medical care if you saw a doctor. But 25 percent of the points scored were for seeing a doctor. And so in America where for medical care, you had to pay, it might have been a little harder to see a doctor or you actually had to pay for a doctor, whereas the WHO studyis looking at seeing a doctor for free. Well, we didn’t meet that metric, but the fact is America has consistently had better outcomes, and to the extent it doesn’t have better outcomes, the question isn’t even one of access. It’s one of cultural differences and health care choices. It’s our drug addiction problem. It is our weight problem. It is our drinking problem, it is our being sedentary problem. It is our having a lot of increasingly crazy people problem. Maternal health care amongst blacks is worse, not because black women aren’t getting the health care, but because they have different health issues. One of the things COVID revealed is that most American blacks whose skin is attuned to the equatorial African sun are spending their entire days in offices. And so they have massive Vitamin D deficiencies. That leads to lower immune systems, more heart disease, more diabetes. So a lot of our problems are really deep cultural problems that have nothing to do with health care. So, anyway, I got off track, but the point is ultimately, there’s always going to be rationing and the newest form of rationing is I mentioned regarding England, is euthanasia. And the Post Millennium reported the other day that medically assisted suicide accounted for nearly one in twenty deaths in Canada in 2023. According to the country’s fifth annual report on euthanasia since it was legalized in 2016, the report revealed that approximately 15,300 people underwent euthanasia last year following approved applications. Which was 4.7 percent of the roughly 320,000 total deaths in the country. Euthanasia, as I think Michael Knowles was saying, we all imagine a 92-year-old in the last throes of life in agony from cancer dying. It’s not how it works. In a well-run medical system, A. people don’t need to be in agony. Pain management can be very good. Now, having said that, I remember a decade ago, speaking with a doctor friend whose specialty was pain management, just so angry about new requirements controlling, again, this is a regulation problem, controlling access to opioids. And this is a response to opioid addiction, which was a problem. But of course, and I can’t remember if it was California or federal laws, went completely overboard and made opioids impossible to get for everybody. Including people with chronic pain and people dying from very painful diseases like cancer. And this was a good Democrat who was so angry because he was unable to give people the medicines they needed to control pain. These were not junkies, these were not addicts, these were not people whose lives were spiraling out of control. These were people who were like Luigi Mangione, going crazy from pain. Or dying. So, pain management should not be an issue. But pain management is expensive. And this is people who are depressed. Well, depression is a product of the modern age. It’s a product of giving people anti-depressants that don’t work. It’s a product of a neolistic culture that leaves people without hope. If, and I say this truly speaking from the bottom of my heart, if you are unhappy, I urge you to get Dennis Prager’s book, Happiness is a Serious Problem, which is a distillation of rabbinical wisdom about how we can be happier people and why we have an obligation to be happy and how to counter an unhappy culture. I practice an attitude of gratitude every single minute of every single day because that is how to be happy. To be grateful, to recognize the wonders of what we have. And believe me, I speak as someone who has come from the abyss. So, anyway, that’s my moment. So, socialized medicine, it will always ration, the state will not love you, ultimately it will kill you. Because once you stop contributing to the state via your taxes or your labor, the tax… the state has no use for you and it will kill you. Remember, when Hitler started he didn’t start killing the Jews. He started killing the mentally ill and the chronically ill. One of my great-uncles was one of those who died. My family on both the Christian and the Jewish side had people whom Hitler killed. So, just something to keep in mind. The alternative is something we do not have in America. People say that America has a market-based system and it’s failing. I think I have shown, I hope I have shown, we do not have a market-based system. We still need some regulation. We still need help for widows and orphans. There’s still a place for core insurance which is for emergencies. There is still a place for places like Kaiser, which I adore, where part of what you pay for is an enclosed system that encourages pre-care. Because Kaiser has encouraged- concluded that within its system, maintenance is more affordable than illness. So, a free market will sort all this out. And one of the main things a free market will do in a highly technical medical field is bring prices down. And my example always is thumb drives. Flash drives, whatever you want to call them. I remember when they first came out, they couldn’t handle about one page worth of data and they cost 800 dollars. And now, they have terabytes that are handed out for free at trade fairs. And yes, I understand that part of the decreased cost is that we’re flooded with junk stuff from China which is subsidized by the Chinese government. So suddenly, we’re like Europe. We subsidized Europe’s health care; China’s subsidizing our thumb drives while destroying our economy. But basically, the free market brings everything down. Another example is Fuji apples, which I happen to love. They were a Japanese delicacy that cost an arm and a leg, and once American growers saw a market, more and more were planted. Prices went down. The free market is the answer. And it’s the one thing we haven’t had since at least World War II. So, you have a choice of euthanasia and other medical rationing and no treatment for people who are old, and broken-down hospitals, and horrible things. Or we can go to a lightly-controlled morally controlled free market model. And that is what I have to say on the subject. Thank you.