When Governments Fail Their People — Oregon’s Health Care Crisis and Britain’s Collapse

About this episode

The cost to stay healthy in Oregon is about to climb again — and across the Atlantic, a country that gave us free speech and common law is unraveling in real time. This week, two conversations about what happens when government systems reach their breaking point.

First, Oregon regulators just confirmed that health insurers want a 17% average rate increase for 2027 — on top of last year’s 11% jump. Worse, two of the state’s biggest carriers, Providence and PacificSource, are leaving the individual market entirely, forcing more than 50,000 Oregonians to scramble for new coverage. Independent health insurance broker Lisa Lettenmaier of Health Source NW returns to break down what is actually driving the numbers: a shrinking pool of carriers, the expiration of pandemic-era subsidies, and a Medicare/Medicaid system now covering 41% of the population. She and Mark dig into the real engine of medical inflation — the enormous markup providers can charge once the government, not the consumer, is setting the price.

Then the show turns to the United Kingdom. Heritage Foundation senior fellow Simon Hankinson — who spent his formative years in Britain and earned two of his degrees there — joins Mark to make sense of a country in crisis: the attempted beheading in Belfast that touched off nights of rioting, the collapse of immigration enforcement, the two-tier justice system, and a stunning new privately funded report estimating that grooming gangs abused hundreds of thousands of British girls while authorities looked away. The segment closes on the question that should matter most to American listeners: is the U.S. experience different enough to avoid the same fate — or are we just a few years behind?

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