Unhealthy

On Tuesday, Senator Elizabeth Warren spoke to the HuffPost about the celebratory reaction to the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson by the far left on social media. She said, "The visceral response from people across this country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the health care system. This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone." 

Senator Bernie Sanders also condemned the health care system in response to Thompson’s death. "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." Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made an even more absurd claim to justify the murder when she said, “I think for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them.” So, if a denied claim is an act of violence, therefore, Luigi Mangione killed Brian Thompson in self-defense.

It is one thing when anonymous people on Facebook, or the fringes of politics, or even if a famous comedian mocks or justifies a cold-blooded murder, it is absolutely scary when members the United States Congress do it. These people speak against health insurance companies as if Brian Thompson was sitting up on a throne like Julius Caesar and arbitrarily giving the thumbs up or thumbs down as to which claim should be approved or which should be denied. Health insurance policies do not work that way.

In 2010, we were told that health insurance premiums were going down and coverage would be expanded with Obamacare. The fact that these problems are worse means that Obama and the Democrats lied to us. And now they rage at insurance companies for issues that their legislation was passed to fix, but in fact made much worse. When you mandate that everybody must buy health insurance, and you mandate what must be covered, the cost of health insurance increases as well as the cost of all medical care. And because the government intervention drove up insurance prices, one way insurance companies tried to reduce the cost of premiums was by limiting coverage where they could. It was a typical Cloward–Piven strategy. The government intervenes and makes the problems in the system much worse, and then steps in to say the only way to fix the problems that the government just exacerbated was for the government to take over the entire system. That’s their agenda.

It is interesting that these far left-wing politicians, who jump on any incident to call for taking guns out of law-abiding citizens’ hands, have not once, blamed the gun for shooting Brian Thompson. It is also important to point out that the shooting occurred in New York City which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation. But the bottom line is that Warren, Sanders and AOC are communists. They want the government to take over every aspect of our lives, and in this instance, government run healthcare is more important for their agenda than taking guns away from the citizens.

The Internet claims that United Healthcare has the highest claim denial rate at 32% of any of the major health insurance companies, as if that justifies the killing of Brian Thompson. It doesn’t. The question I have is if United Healthcare has this high of a claim denial rate, then why is it still in business? Why wasn’t it run out of business a long time ago? Why does it remain the biggest health insurance provider in the nation when there are at least, 11 other health insurance companies with better claim approval rates? Does that make any sense? It appears that the only reason why anybody would buy health insurance from United Healthcare is because it is very cheap. So, the insured are complaining about United Healthcare being cheap when it comes to covering their medical care when in fact, the insured chose the health insurance with the cheapest premiums, so they were the ones being cheap with their own healthcare.

But this isn’t about United Healthcare, it’s about the left wanting the government to take over our healthcare system, so the government can take over everybody’s life like they did during Covid. What did we discover from Covid? The people running government medical agencies like the HHS, FDA, CDC and NIAID, we’re not only incompetent, they were corrupt. The left wants the people who kept us locked in our homes, who closed down schools and businesses, who sent Covid positive patients back to nursing homes to kill thousands of elderly people, and then did not allow the family members of the elderly people to visit them as they die, who forced people to take experimental drugs, while also making millions of dollars off those drugs, to run our healthcare system.

If you think Brian Thompson was evil, greedy and corrupt, take a good hard look at Dr. Fauci – one of the longest serving bureaucrats in US history – who made $8 million off of Covid. The difference is that nobody was forced to buy health insurance from United Healthcare, but tens of millions of people were forced to take Dr. Fauci’s experimental medicine that he made $8 million off of. Imagine the layers of corruption that will be created when the government is running our entire health industry, when citizens have no other choices other than what the government offers or requires by law.

Why are the health insurance companies the only one targeted in this discussion? Why aren’t they targeting the doctors living in mansions charging $100,000 for an open-heart surgery? Why aren’t they targeting the CEOs of hospitals who make on average over $900,000 per year charging $3,000 per one night stay in a hospital bed? Why aren’t they targeting the CEOs of pharmaceutical companies which made $100 billion in profit last year? Why aren’t those layers of the medical industry called out for their too high profit margins in administering healthcare? Well, if they charged less for surgery or for a night stay in the hospital or reduce the profits on drugs, then they all would be losing money. The doctor would leave the profession, the hospital would go out of business, and the pharmaceutical company would not spend billions of dollars to produce new drugs. But we demand that insurance companies to cut their profit margin razor thin by paying for things that are not on the policy even if it means that the company will lose money and eventually go out of business.

Does any business owner not want to maximize their profits? Taylor Swift charges $1,000 per ticket, and Ticketmaster charges $350 for a processing fee, and her fans pay that gladly, but would scream bloody murder if the insurance company denied their claim for $50 prescription. We live in a capitalist society. Everybody’s taking a profit for what they do. Does anybody work for free? But you’ll say it’s different because healthcare is a necessity, and going to a Taylor Swift concert is entertainment – it’s a choice. Healthcare is a necessity, so is food, so is having a home, so is having clothes. There are a lot of things that are necessities and the companies that sell those things still make a sizeable profit. That is how our system works. And if every industry in our capitalist system cut their profit margins the way we demand the health insurance companies do, then every consumer would have much more money to spend on their healthcare and maybe be able to buy better insurance. But no one would do that. You see, it is always the other guy who is greedy.

But it’s different. Our health is the most important thing for a human being. Then why don’t we as a society behave that way? How many people who are so concerned about the cost of healthcare, and greedy insurance companies, actually live a healthy lifestyle? The United States of America has an obesity rate twice that of the industrialize world, but if you say anything about how overweight America is, then you are body shaming. It is hard to listen to complaints about our healthcare system from the segment of our society which glorifies Lizzo and her body positivity movement.

More people in America die from diet related deaths then from smoking, and about half of US deaths are from heart disease – which total about 900 deaths per day – and that is linked to our lifestyle, our diet. A study conducted by Oregon State University found that only 2.7% of Americans live a healthy lifestyle. Our unhealthy lifestyle leads to high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. And the treatment of all those diseases drives up healthcare costs for everyone.

Excessive alcohol consumption is the leading preventable cause of illness and death in the United States according to the CDC. Excessive drinking was defined as 15 drinks a week for men, and eight drinks a week for women. In 2023, Americans spent $89.9 billion on alcohol, yet we do not want to spend much on our healthcare. Last year, 28,859,000 people in America had an alcohol use disorder; there were 4,126,082 alcohol related emergency room visits; there were 178,307 alcohol related deaths; and there were over 177 million people who used alcohol. Maybe, one of the reasons why we live such unhealthy lifestyles is that we arrogantly believe our superior healthcare system is a safety net to save us from our poor health decisions.

So, everybody wants to paint Brian Thompson as the bad guy because he didn’t care about the health and well-being of the American people. When in fact, the American people don’t care about their own health and well-being. How many people are willing to change their lifestyle? Change the way they eat; exercise five times a week; give up alcohol, cigarettes, drugs? So, we can rant and rave about the greedy health insurance CEOs as we sit on our asses, not exercising, stuffing our faces with unhealthy food and chasing it down with a six pack of beer, and then want the CEO of these health insurance companies to pay for every single one of our medical bills, even if it wasn’t covered on our cheap policy. There’s an old saying, every time you point a finger, there are three fingers pointing back at you.

If you want to live an unhealthy lifestyle, you’re going to pay a lot more for your medical bills. Don’t get me wrong, I am not nearly as healthy as I should be, but I also don’t complain about health insurance CEOs either. If I have a heart attack tomorrow, it would not have been Brian Thompson's fault, but my own fault. If anything, this whole incident has opened my eyes – not to want to murder a CEO of a health insurance company – but to take control of my health by getting my ass on the treadmill every day, and deciding to stop eating French fries, ice cream and other such garbage.

In a season 5 episode of the TV show, The Office, Dwight conducts a fire drill, and in the confusion and intensity to exit the building, Stanley has heart attack. Later, Phyllis shouts at Dwight, “you’re gave Stanley a heart attack.” And Dwight responds, “Yeah, right. I filled him full of butter and sugar for 50 years, and forced him not to exercise.” It was not Dwight’s fault that Stanley had a heart attack, and it is not the fault of health insurance CEO’s that healthcare in America costs so much. Isn’t it ironic that Luigi Mangione’s last meal as a free man was McDonald’s?

We live the least healthy lifestyle in the industrialize world, yet we complain that we spend the most on healthcare. Don’t expect health insurance CEOs to care more about your health than you do. If Americans as a whole started living a much healthier lifestyle, then the cost of healthcare, the cost of health insurance premiums, and what we spend in medical care would go down dramatically. 

I’m not calling for price controls in the medical industry. I’m not calling for limiting profits in corporate America, I’m not calling for shutting down McDonald’s, or banning alcohol. We are all free agents. We can all live however we please. That is the American way. We live in a country where we could live the healthiest lifestyle of anyone on the planet, and yet we choose to do the exact opposite, and somehow, we expect that the consequences of our unhealthy lifestyle will not impact our lives. It does. And when it does, we get angry that other people do not care about us more than we care about ourselves.

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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.