OPINION:
The Dec. 4 murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson brought back into the public spotlight advocates of socialized medicine. Like vultures, they always show up when there’s blood in the streets.
Prominent again is Sen. Bernard Sanders, Vermont independent and self-proclaimed “democratic socialist.” In recent remarks, he began with a pro-forma denunciation of the killing by suspect Luigi Mangione as “outrageous” and “unacceptable.” Decency should have stopped Mr. Sanders there.
Instead, he continued with a rote recitation of his call for socialized medicine, “I think what the outpouring of anger at the health care industry tells us is that millions of people understand that health care is a human right and that you cannot have people in the insurance industry rejecting needed health care for people while they make billions of dollars in profit.”
He pushed his “Medicare for All” plan, a major topic in June in Burlington when he hosted a Sanders Institute Gathering of the think tank modestly named after himself. One of the top speakers was Wendell Potter, who in 2008 quit in protest as vice president of corporate communications for Cigna, a major American health insurance company.
At the gathering, Mr. Potter told a story about an unidentified health industry executive who was asked by someone, “What keeps you up at night?” The executive answered, “Disintermediation,” meaning cutting the profit-making “mediation” of the insurance companies out of the equation, directly connecting the patient with doctors providing treatment.
The executive added, “Employers, in particular, would begin to wake up and question the value proposition of big insurance companies as the middleman. But they, as middlemen, take more and more and more of the dollars that we spend on health care.”
But just days after CEO Thompson’s killing, economist Noah Smith analyzed the financials of UnitedHealthcare. He said, “Its net profit margin is just 6.11%. … That’s only about half of the average profit margin of companies in the S&P 500.” Other companies’ profits: Elevance Health: between 2% and 4%. Centene: 1% to 2%. Cigna, Mr. Potter’s old company: 2% to 3%. “These companies are just making very little profit at all.”
Despite what Mr. Potter says, there’s no “disintermediation.” Money and medical resources are not infinite. If it’s not the private sector that’s the “middleman,” it’s the government.
And none other than Mr. Sanders has direct experience supervising “mediation” of the country’s largest health care system, the government-run Veterans Health Administration. He chaired the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs from 2013 to 2015 and remains a member.
He effectively was the chairman of the system board when the Veterans Affairs scandal exploded like a howitzer shell in May 2014. As U.S. News reported shortly afterward, that included “allegations that VA workers around the country had hidden how long patients waited to see doctors, possibly contributing to the deaths of dozens of veterans from delayed care.”
The scandal prodded Congress to pass H.R. 3230, the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act of 2014. It allowed veterans greater access to “non-VA” medical care to relieve shortages. Even socialist Sanders voted for it.
Mr. Sanders’ “Medicare for All” plan seems to build on the success of the existing Medicare plan, which all Americans get when they turn 65. A 2023 Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 81% of U.S. adults held “very favorable” or “somewhat favorable” views on the program.
“Medicare for All” would absorb existing Medicare into a vastly larger system at greater cost and unknown quality. A 2024 study by the American Action Forum calculated it would “increase federal spending by $43.9 trillion between 2026 and 2035.” That’s $4.4 trillion a year. But the entire federal budget for fiscal 2024, which ended on Sept. 30, was $6.8 trillion.
The deficit was $1.8 trillion, boosting the national debt to today’s $36.3 trillion and rising. The interest alone on the debt was $1.2 trillion. There’s no way to pencil out paying for Medicare for All. The result of this plan by Messrs. Sanders and Potter would be national financial collapse.
“Medicare for All” is the ultimate quack cure. Leeches and snake oil would work better and cost less.
• Ashley Herzog is a freelance writer for the Heartland Institute, one of the world’s leading free market think tanks.