I stumbled across this old tweet and article that basically lays out the problem with health care in the United States.

Basically, many of the worst doctors are leaving medicine and making sometimes life-altering decisions as to whether or not you can get the treatment that your reputable doctor thinks you need. These decision makers include doctors who were sued many times for botching treatment and have essentially been forced out of the profession.

The bigger question of course is why should an insurance company get to question this at all? They really shouldn’t. And while opposition to universal health care has included scare tactics of socialism, higher taxes, etc. the reality is that study after study shows that your individual yearly cost for healthcare would be much, much less if you weren’t paying insurance premiums, co-pays, out of pocket costs, etc.

Legally this leads to so many troubles. Most individual bankruptcies have medical bills as a part of them. I’ve seen people lose their life savings in order to pay for an operation. Even in cases where medical coverage shouldn’t be an issue, like workers’ compensation, we see doctors doing “record reviews” to try and help an insurance company avoid care. This happens often with doctors who are actually either very old, out of state or both. It’s a joke.

Of course if there was universal health care, we’d remove so much costly red tape. Many insurance executives would be out of a job and wouldn’t have income to buy their 4th home. Boo hoo. I as a lawyer would be affected as I’d lose out on many great cases and nothing would make me happier. We don’t want people to suffer and our current system does that.

If you are “pro-living” this should be your stance. Sadly, it doesn’t appear we will ever have enough politicians courageous enough to make this change.