Dave & Dujanovic: What can we do to reform healthcare?
Dec 18, 2024, 11:19 AM | Updated: 11:51 am
FILE - A UnitedHealthcare Group Medicare Advantage PPO card rests on top of a Medicare card is seen in Portland, Ore., June 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane, File)
Credit: ASSOCIATED PRESS
(AP Photo/Jenny Kane, File)
SALT LAKE CITY — In the aftermath of the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, reactions have been mostly mournful. However, a vocal minority has praised the accused shooter Luigi Mangione as a hero, and the murder as justified.
Jay Evensen, Opinion Editor of the Deseret News, recently wrote “Reform health care, but not under threat of a gun.” He told Dave & Dujanovic’s Debbie Dujanovic he finds many of the reactions he’s seen online to be upsetting.
“[There are] so many people who are treating Luigi Mangione as some type of a hero. There are people who are tattooing his face on their bodies … [and] there are people who are going way overboard on this,” Evensen said. “We’re not going to solve the problem if we have hatred, if we have mistrust. We have to face this head-on. And it’s not new. Americans like to look for … the Robin Hood figure, right?”
The history of healthcare in America
In a recent opinion piece, the New York Times wrote, “No one would design a healthcare system like the one we have and no one did.” The NYT calls America’s healthcare system “a patchwork built over decades.” Evensen said he agrees with this sentiment.
He uses the origin of health insurance as an example. According to Evensen, in World War II, President Roosevelt froze wages. During this, companies couldn’t offer more money as a benefit to new employees. Thus, health insurance was born.
“What a lot of companies did was they said, ‘Okay, we’ll offer you health insurance and that will be part of your employment,'” he said.
He says now Americans, more or less, have to have a fulltime job to have good health insurance.
What it’s like now
Evensen said the U.S. healthcare system has inefficiencies and a lack of transparency.
“We do have a system now where it’s really hard to tell, why some people are being rejected and some people are not,” he said. “Is artificial intelligence a part of that? We need to have discussions about this. It’s interesting to me that nobody was really talking about this before Brian Thompson was murdered.”
A big question for Evensen is should Americans have a national socialized healthcare, like the Affordable Care Act, or is private healthcare better?
“I don’t know if that’s if it’s always so black and white like that,” he said. “The last Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment. I saw said about 62% of Americans now support the Affordable Care Act … we really haven’t come very far since [it was passed].”
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Devin Oldroyd is a digital content producer for KSL NewsRadio. Follow them on X.
