Tag Archives: Single Payer System

Personal Injury And Access To Medical Care

We need a single payer health care system and we need it now.

I’m a personal injury attorney. What that means is that I represent individuals who are seriously injured in accidents, falls, workplace injuries, trucking accidents, boating accidents and the list goes on and on – you get the picture.

You probably wouldn’t think that my job description includes “health care provider,” but it does, or at least it often feels as though it does.

When I began my practice, at the beginning of the previous decade, very little of my time was spent on finding and acquiring medical care for my clients. Now over a third of my time is spent either locating and obtaining health care for my clients or dealing with the liens, bills, and aftermath of that care.

The reason I, and every other personal injury attorney, spend so much of time finding and obtaining and managing medical care for our clients is because the health care system in this country is broken. Seriously. Fee for services has not worked, insurance controlled care has not worked, it’s been a total and complete failure.

Proof of this failure is that there continue to be individuals who cannot afford and cannot access adequate health care. People are still going bankrupt because of medical bills, people are still having difficulty getting the care they need, and this is wrong. The Affordable Care Act was a good step in the right direction but it was only a step. We have an inefficient, ineffective, bloated and costly, outdated, and immoral health care system in this country that needs to change and change dramatically. 

Several years ago while traveling to New Zealand I became ill; I got on the plane with a bad cold and got off with bronchitis. After about a day of me coughing my lungs up, we decided that medical care was needed. But wait, that would mean utilizing New Zealand’s socialized medicine – the drab and dirty facilities, the red-tape and bureaucratic nightmare and rationing of care, the horror! Not really.

My wife’s cousin’s doctor agreed to see me and I got in the same day. The facility was new and clean and bright, there was parking, the wait was less then ten minuets, I got to visit with an M.D., the treatment and care were excellent, and the cost, for both the treatment and prescription that I was given, was barely more than my co-pay would have been in California for the visit alone. In short, everything was better.

Two articles this weekend in the New York Times illustrate the need for a single payer health care system. The first is  an excellent article in yesterday’s (Sunday) paper illustrating how even a small medical advance can translate into serious increases in bills for patients. And what an increase in bills means is more financial burden, more hardship, and more difficulty for patients when they can least handle it.

The second is an article on the implementation of a single payer system in Vermont. The full system won’t be in place until 2017 but it is meant to serve as a test ground to see if a single payer system can work in the US. There is of course no reason it shouldn’t work. A version of such a system has worked for Germany, Japan, Great Britain, France, New Zealand, Australia, and our closest neighbor Canada to name a few.

We will keep our fingers crossed that Vermont’s system is a success. But 2017 is a long time from now. And there are injury victims and the ill who need a better and more accessible system now.

If you would like to read the articles referred to above, you can find there here and here.