COLUMN: Kill Obamacare, not CEOs

Inasmuch as the most popular reaction to the cold-blooded murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson has been to hail the shooter as a hero, I gather that Americans really hate health insurance companies.

Apparently, Obamacare isn't all it was cracked up to be.

Valedictorian McDonald's boy's rage is justified but wildly misses the target because literally everything wrong with health care was given to us by Barack Obama and the Democrats. Without a single Republican vote, they jammed through Obamacare in an unconstitutional procedure wrecking the already government-corrupted health insurance business.

We were promised that under Obamacare:

1. Everyone would have affordable, quality health care.

2. Not a dime would be added to the deficit.

3. Premiums would go down.

4. You could keep your health insurance if you liked it.

5. You could keep your doctor if you liked him.

And it all came true! Except those last five things.

Premiums went through the roof because Democrats mandated, among other things, that insurance companies cover an array of exotic medical treatments popular with their base — e.g., men who think they're women, people who can't figure out how to use a condom, drug addicts, day drinkers, people who bring their emotional support Shetland ponies on airplanes, and so on.

You know why it took 90 days to get approval for treating your baby's brain tumor? Your insurance company was tapped out after paying for thousands upon thousands of transgender surgeries, as mandated by the Democrats.

Here are just a few of the covered services expressly for transgenders listed on United Healthcare's webpage:

* Bilateral mastectomy or breast reduction

* Breast augmentation with breast implants or fat transfer

* Clitoroplasty (creation of clitoris)

* Hysterectomy (removal of uterus)

* Labiaplasty (creation of labia)

* Laser or electrolysis hair removal in advance of genital reconstruction

* Metoidioplasty (creation of penis, using clitoris)

* Orchiectomy (testicle removal)

* Penectomy (removal of penis)

* Penile prosthesis

* Phalloplasty (creation of penis)

* Salpingo-oophorectomy (removal of fallopian tubes and ovaries)

* Scrotoplasty (creation of scrotum)

* Testicular prostheses

* Thyroid cartilage reduction/reduction thyroid chondroplasty/tracheal shave (removal or reduction of the Adam's apple)

The list goes on for a full page. Surely you didn't imagine that your health insurer would pay for all that — plus grandma's Parkinson's? (On the other hand, if grandma's Alzheimer's make her think she might be a man, she's covered.)

Obamacare is a welfare program for people with freakish sexual predilections, except that instead of being funded with tax revenue, it's funded with our insurance premiums. The middle class pays through the nose for health insurance in order to enable insurance companies to comply with a preposterous government mandates.

Until this welfare program for bizarre "medical" treatments is decoupled from the insurance market, nothing will work. It would be as if, instead of handing out food stamps, the government forced grocery stores to give poor people free food. The rest of us would end up having to pay $1,000 for a carton of milk.

Remember Helen Ouyang, the associate professor at Columbia University, who, writing in The New York Times in April 2020, invented a "26-year-old physician" who died of COVID at a New York hospital?

She's back this week, to join the chorus of voices denouncing health insurance companies, blithely ignoring the government's leading role in creating this disaster. You'd think that, while writing the following paragraph, Dr. Ouyang might have had a spark of recognition:

"My one family member with solid insurance is my dog. He got elective surgery recently, and I was astounded by the straightforward nature of his insurance. Once we meet the deductible, everything is simply covered by 80 percent. ... It's incredible to think that insurance for pets and possessions is easier to navigate and more consumer-friendly than insurance for people."

Until recently, pet insurance — which has been around for a hundred years — was completely unregulated by the government. Only in the last 10 years or so have some states begun to impose light regulation, similar to property insurance.

That's somewhat different from Obamacare's 11,000 pages of regulations.

Let's review what Democrats promised us when it was passed.

— "[Obamacare] will provide more security and stability to those who have health insurance. ... It saves money, and it saves lives." — President Obama, September 2009

— "We will have quality, affordable health care for all Americans." — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, January 2010

— "No one should go bankrupt because they get sick. This bill would fix that." — Montana Sen. Max Baucus, a key Obamacare backer, September 2009

— "[Obamacare] will save lives and it will save money. ... It cracks down on the worst abuses of insurance companies." — Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, September 2009

Ten years later, and Democrats are crapping all over health care in America, without ever mentioning that we're currently, right now, living under their last great idea for fixing it.

— Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, 2019: "They all had great health insurance right at the beginning. But then they found out when they really needed it, when the costs went up, that the insurance company pulled the rug out from underneath them and they were left with nothing."

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, 2019: "I get a little bit tired ... of people defending a system which is dysfunctional, which is cruel, 87 million uninsured, 30,000 people dying every single year, 500,000 people going bankrupt for one reason, they came down with cancer."

I think they're referring to the "quality, affordable health care for all Americans" part of the ACA.

If we get nothing else out of this poor man's murder, can we all finally admit that Obamacare is an unmitigated disaster and everything Democrats said about it was a big fat lie? Putting a bullet in an insurance executive won't do anything to change that. Only putting a bullet in Obamacare and regulating health insurance like we regulate pet insurance will work.