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Yes, his writings before his likely psychotic break were more cogent. He even wrote about how complicated systems can not be reduced to trivial solutions.
In any case, the profits of the entire medical insurance industry are $70 billion up against medical spending around $5 trillion. Even if we factor in executive pay, the total amount of profit that is taken from the system is very little.
The only possible justification I could see from his actions is on accelerationist grounds. His actions will results in hugely increased premiums that will drive healthy people out of the system, making it collapse sooner. Of course, nothing in his rant indicates that this is his justification.
But look on the bright side! If you want to get an expensive, dangerous, and ineffective back surgery in the next calendar year, you might be able to get someone else to pay for it!
The costs of the medical insurance industry are far greater than its profits. But a lot of that cost doesn't go to fat cat executives. It goes to armies of support personnel (claim evaluators, billing coders, etc) to produce the vast amount of paperwork involved, some of them working for insurance companies and some of them working for providers. It goes to diverting the time of people who are nominally care providers into handing that paperwork and arguing with insurance companies. And lots of other ancillary personnel.
Of course, if you got rid of that, medical costs would go to infinity even faster. The insurance gating function is a necessary thing given that the pricing signals at both ends (consumer and provider) have been systematically destroyed. Everything's downstream of people wanting medical care without having to pay for it.
How did those other price signals get systematically destroyed? What alternative solutions are there?
It started with employer-provided health insurance around WWII. There was typically 20% coinsurance on that, which only attenuated the price signals. Then we got HMOs, and PPOs and POS and all the other things which made health care essentially flat-rate (plus small co-pay), but had various gating methods to control cost (which users hated). Then governments worked on neutering the gating mechanisms, Obamacare being part of that.... and we are here.
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Exactly. My worry is that the only place this could end up is with a Bernie Sanders style regime: unlimited luxury care provided at government expense, where every procedure is approved with no check on costs.
It's astounding to me that we pay 20% of GDP in health care. But if we follow the incoherent demands of the pro-assassination crowd, this is just the beginning. It could easily double, with hard-working healthy people forced to pay exorbitant taxes so that every drug addict gets a full-time nurse, every hypochrondriac gets exploratory surgery, and every minor illness is treated with a suite of expensive medications.
The problem isn't the insurance industry. It's waste and overutilization of the medical system.
Maybe there's some hope that, once premiums increase enough, the system will really collapse and revert to something resembling a free market. But I think the Bernie Sanders medico-tyranny version is more likely.
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