Murder of CEO reveals idolatry and covetousness in the US

The recent murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City reveals a dark side to culture in the US. Many people are cheering, according to USA Today:

"The Midtown Manhattan killing tapped a groundswell of public anger over an industry the public often only knows through impersonal delays and denials to needed health care, said Wendell Potter, a former CIGNA executive who became a whistleblower against the health insurance industry.

"'I've been hearing for years now from people who have been so frustrated because of denials or delays of care, and this was an opportunity for people to vent and to take out their anger against someone who just became known to them all of a sudden,' Potter said."

Such threats against health insurance company executives are common in the US according to some reports. Why isn't there similar anger against bureaucrats in socialists countries where waiting periods for treatment and denials are far greater?

If medical care in the US is so awful, why do people from other countries fly here for treatment? Google for "medical tourism." Millions of Canadians and Europeans travel to the US for medical care their nation health insurance plans refuse to pay. No Americans go to Canada or Europe for medical care. 

Canadians are very happy with their socialist system of healthcare. The closest thing Brits have to a religion is its National Health Service. Yes, it has problems. No one suggests changing it and the only proposed solutions that people will approve is more tax infusions to keep it alive. With longer waiting periods and higher denial rates, why aren't Canadians and Brits murdering the bureaucrats who run their systems?

If socialist healthcare is so great, what are all those Canadians doing in our hospitals?

I was in a hotel in Houston recently and ran into several families from the UK who had a family member receiving medical treatment for cancer at the MD Anderson Cancer Center there. I have read many stories of Canadians flying south for medical treatment. I began to wonder, if socialized medicine is as great as the UK and Canada claim, why are these people here?

So I began looking into medical tourism. Most of the information you will find on the internet talks about US citizens going to Asia for great care at a much reduced price. I have no problem with that. The American Medical Association wielding the sword of government has made US healthcare insanely expensive. I once told a doctor from Scotland what Americans pay for an office visit and he called me a liar. He said no sane person would pay that much. I had to agree with his last statement.

Healthcare in the US follows Nazi model

Few Americans understand how socialist our healthcare system is. The evidence comes from the many articles that trash Europeans socialist healthcare and refer to the US system as free market. The truth is that the US system is about as socialist as any in Europe, but in worse ways. It follows the National Socialist pattern.

Ludwig von Mises, the greatest economist of the twentieth century, wrote in Planned Chaos that there have been two means of achieving socialism, the Soviet and the German, or Nazi. In the Soviet system,

All economic enterprises are departments of the government just as the administration of the army and the navy or the postal system. Every single plant, shop or farm, stands in the same relation to the superior central organization as does a post office to the office of the Postmaster-General.

The second pattern – we may call it the German or Swangswirtschaft system – differs from the first one in that it, seemingly and nominally, maintains private ownership of the means of production, entrepreneurship, and market exchange. So-called entrepreneurs do the buying and selling, pay the workers, contract debts and pay interest and amortization. But they are no longer entrepreneurs. In Nazi Germany they were called shop managers of Betriebsfuhrer. The government tells these seeming entrepreneurs what and how to produce, at what prices and from whom to buy, at what prices and to whom to sell. The government decrees at what wages laborurers should work, and to whom and under what terms the capitalists should entrust their funds. Market exchange is but a sham.

Property requires control of it by the owner. When the state controls the property, as it did in Germany, people no longer have property regardless of what the paper title says. Now keep the Nazi flavor of socialism in mind as we discuss healthcare pricing.

Socialist Eat Their Young

It’s well known that “millennials” prefer socialism to capitalism. That doesn’t worry me, though. Someone said that if you aren’t a socialist when you’re young you don’t have a heart; if you’re not a capitalist when you age you have no head.

Most young people think they can transfer the morality of the family to the nation and it takes a while for them to understand the fallacy, if they ever do. A lot of PhD economists haven’t caught on.

The public school system has taught them “milk cow” economics for twelve years that says socialism is about sharing and caring while capitalism is nothing but greed. Who would want to identify with capitalism after a dozen years of such brainwashing?

But the main reason millennials oppose capitalism is that they can see how the student debt problem, lack of jobs, slow wage growth, etc. assault them, while the media, economists and conservative politicians chant daily that this is a capitalist system. Why wouldn’t they hate capitalism?

The US rejected Obamacare in 1918

What a difference a mere hundred years makes! US voters rejected mandatory health insurance, or Obamacare, at the turn of the last century. It took supporters almost another century, but they finally won. 

For a quarter century before WWI, many of the nation’s young people had gone to Germany to complete their college education and had returned determined to recreate the US in the image of socialist Germany. Richard Ely was one. He founded the American Economic Association for that sole purpose. He and economist Irving Fisher would lead the drive for universal, mandatory healthcare insurance.

At the time, middle class and wealthier Americans paid a fee each time they visited a doctor. But the fees were too high for the working poor, so they had organized into mutual aid societies to help each other with medical costs. Known as lodges, such as the Elks, or secret societies such the International Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF) or the Free Masons, or just fraternal organizations, mutual help societies had existed for centuries. They followed the ancient guild practices of mutual aid to craft members. David T. Beito beautifully writes their history in his book From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services 1890-1967, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2000.