Dignity in Dying

On Wednesday morning, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, 50, was shot and killed in Midtown Manhattan as he walked toward the Hilton hotel that was hosting his company’s annual investor conference. The gunman is still at large. The motivation for the killing has not yet been determined despite the wide array of speculation. The bullet casings found at the scene had the words, “Defend”, “Deny” and “Depose” written on them, so it is fair to say that this was not a random act of violence but a targeted attack.

Before Mr. Thompson’s body was even cold, disgraced Washington Post columnist and now Vox Media podcaster Taylor Lorenz openly celebrated his murder on the left-wing social media site, Bluesky, by posting animations of balloons, confetti and a giant star with the words “CEO DOWN” splashed across the front. And thousands of other far-left commentators celebrated with her. Lorenz wrote, “people have very justified hatred toward insurance company CEOs because these executives are responsible for an unfathomable amount of death and suffering. As someone against death and suffering, I think it’s good to call out this broken system and the ppl in power who enable it.” I wonder how Ms. Lorenz would respond if a pro-life activist murdered an abortion provider in cold blood, citing the thousands of babies that the abortionist murdered as justification for the crime?

Lorenz went on to list the names of all the CEOs of the major health insurance companies and wrote, “I hope people learn the names of all of these insurance company CEOs and engage in very peaceful letter writing campaigns so that they stop ruthlessly murdering thousands of innocent Americans by denying coverage. Healthcare is a human right. We need universal healthcare now.” Even though, she called for “peaceful letter campaigns”, we all know that posting their names on the open internet was a clear dog whistle to anyone who may have an inclination to copycat the murder of Brian Thompson. It was a call to violent action – an overt intimidation tactic toward the CEOs on her list.

She exposes her ignorance when she wrote that “we need universal healthcare now” as the way to stop the deaths of “thousands of innocent Americans” by the denial of coverage. So, her answer to the problems we have in the healthcare system in this country is for the United States federal government to take over healthcare. She wants those people who run our government to also run our healthcare system? Has she been paying attention to how the US federal government has been run for decades?

The US government takes in over $7 trillion every year. They overspend every year by $1 trillion and have run up a debt of over $35 trillion, and what have we received for all that overspending? Crumbling infrastructure, failing public school systems, rampant crime in our cities, a homeless epidemic, over 100,000 drug overdoses every year, a social security system on the brink of insolvency, veterans living on the streets unable to get the healthcare that they need.  

And people like Taylor Lorenz want to entrust that federal government to take over our healthcare? You know the federal government that was in bed with the pharmaceutical companies and mandated experimental vaccines that did not work on the population, or they would lose their livelihoods. This same US government funded all of the research to produce the vaccines but allowed the pharmaceutical companies to receive all of the hundreds of billions of dollars of profits from the vaccines which they used to be the industry that donated the most money to political campaigns. We should want the US federal government as far away from our healthcare system as they can possibly be, not running it.

We are constantly told by people on the left that the for-profit business model of America’s healthcare system is warped and broken. They claim that a for-profit healthcare system is inherently evil because it does not incentivize people becoming healthy; it incentivizes people remaining sick. They point out, why would a for-profit system produce medicine that actually cures people or even prevents illness when they make their money on people being perpetually sick? We see that with the pharmaceutical industry who is primarily interested in having residual customers dependent on their pills as opposed to actually curing patients, so they no longer have to rely on their pills. This is a point that Robert F Kennedy Jr – Donald Trump’s nomination for Secretary of Health and Human Services – has made many times, and yet the same people who use his argument to promote universal healthcare are rejecting RFK Jr’s nomination for HHS.

The universal healthcare crowd always point to England and Canada as great examples of the universal healthcare system that we should adopt. They claim universal healthcare is the fairest and the most cost-effective system for everyone. It is a system that puts patients over profits. Its sole purpose is working for and caring about the lives of the people it serves.

But on November 29, 2024, members of British Parliament voted to pass legislation that made assisted suicide legal in both England and Wales. They called it “dying with dignity”. It is very similar to the legislation passed in Canada in 2021 called, the MAID act – Medical Assistance in Dying – which legalized assisted suicide in that country. Not surprising, in 2022, 13,241 people received medically assisted deaths in Canada which was a 31.2 per cent jump over 2021. This year, Canada passed an amendment to the MAID Act which gives mentally ill people the legal right to choose to commit suicide with the help of medical professionals. So, a person who is not in their right mind to live on his own, according to Canadian law, is enough in their right mind to decide to kill themselves. It is almost as if the Canadian government wants these people to die.

These assisted suicide laws are being passed in England and Canada, not to protect the rights of the patients, but to protect their universal healthcare systems. Over 90% of healthcare costs are accumulated in the last year of a person’s life or in treating chronic illnesses. And these are the very patients that are being encouraged to commit suicide in Canada and England. In those countries, once a person gets sick, it is much cheaper for the government for that person to die than it is for that person to stay alive. Every time a sick patient dies in England or Canada, their healthcare system wins. And that is why they both passed the medical assisted suicide laws.

So, the greedy CEOs of the American healthcare system may deny coverage to a sick patient in order to protect the solvency of their company, but the British and Canadian governments encourage sick and chronically ill patients to commit suicide so they do not have to pay the expense of keeping them alive which protects the solvency of their country’s universal healthcare system. A for-profit healthcare system, incentivizes doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies to keep people sick, but a universal government run healthcare system, incentivizes the entire system to promote the death of the sick. It costs the government a lot less money to assist the person to die, then to actually heal the person or to manage their chronic health condition. It is absolutely draconian. “Dignity in dying” is a euphemism for, the government doesn’t want to have to pay for your healthcare anymore, so it is better that you just die. And that is the system that far left people like Taylor Lorenz prefers over our current system.

Ultimately, they want universal healthcare, not because it makes people healthier or it is more cost efficient, they want universal healthcare because they want another lever of power over the people. And the pandemic showed how trustworthy the federal government can be with that type of power. Under the guise of health, they locked us in our homes, prevented us from seeing our dying relatives, shut down our schools and businesses, and forced us to take medication we neither wanted nor needed. Once the federal government gets its claws into our healthcare system, everything will become a health crisis, and they will control every aspect of our lives under the guise of health. And only then, will we long for the days of the private healthcare system, but it will be too late.

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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.