On the Third Hand: Overland Park

On the other hand, I think, probably, this is more about why, wherever we are on the political spectrum, whatever we think about goverment involvement in health care and health insurance mandates in general, we need to have generously funded programs for understanding, treating and locking up violent loons.

Maybe some people take the wrong prescription drug and snap suddenly. But it seems as if Cross went out of his way to advertise the possibility that he would go on a rampage. Why exactly was he out in the community?

On the third hand, the people who do these kinds of things start out as cute, innocent babies. My base assumption is that if intentional evil exists at all, it must be rare. People like Cross must have some kind of chemical imbalance or poorly wired brain cells that cause them to do what they do. Pubmed — an online database of medical research articles — is full of citations for articles about the physical underpinnings of violent behavior. 

We all have an obligation to support research that looks into ways for identifying the people who have murderous loon syndrome and then putting them somewhere where they have no ability to kill people.

If that costs a lot of tax money, or hurts health insurers’ medical loss ratios, or leads to an unfortunate increase in government involvement in commercial activity, well, deal with it.  Letting people walk around freely with violent loon syndrome is like letting them walk around coughing Ebola virus at people. It’s just not good public policy.

In years past, insurers stepped up in wars for fire safety, against tuberculosis and against smoking. Maybe violent loon syndrome would make another good target.

See also:

• On the Third Hand: Physician pay
• On the Third Hand: Scripts
• On the Third Hand: Numbers