Universal Healthcare – A Backdoor Approach by Paul R. Hollrah

After living in our city home for two years, where my healthcare needs were provided by a Tulsa-based HMO, we decided in May of 2007 to sell our home in the city and live full time at our lake home, situated in a remote 720-acre gated community of beautiful lakes, rolling hills, and crystal clear streams… a place where it’s possible to catch dozens of bass or crappie in an hour or two of fishing, and the lake is just a short block from our front door.

Who would begrudge me the chance to live in a place like this? No one I can think of… except, of course, the Medicare bureaucrats in Washington who instructed my HMO that, since I’ve relocated across county lines, they are no longer permitted to manage my healthcare needs. And since I was unaware of the rule which requires Medicare recipients to register with a new HMO or PPO within 60 days of a change of residence (how silly of me not to invite a Medicare agent to our real estate closing), I became the subject of a raging dispute between the Medicare bureaucracy and my new insurer, Humana, over who, if anyone, would be allowed to manage my healthcare needs. They’ve been fighting for fifteen months now and they’re still at it.

Do the Washington bureaucrats who made that rule care one whit if I live or die? No, all they care about is keeping their government jobs so that they can have access to a taxpayer-financed healthcare program for the rest of their lives. The entire affair tells me that its time to get serious about solving our healthcare dilemma. So how do we get rid of waste and corruption, eliminate frivolous malpractice lawsuits, and improve the quality of and the access to healthcare, while reducing costs to make it affordable for everyone? That’s a very large order… as Hillary Clinton learned in 1993.

We can begin by recognizing that the hundreds of thousands of nameless, faceless paper-pushers who work for Medicare, Medicaid, the HMOs, and the health insurance companies, and the tens of thousands of lawyers who, like John Edwards, make millions suing doctors and hospitals, are pure non-productive overhead. They contribute nothing to anyone’s healthcare needs and they can easily be declared expendable. But how do we design a system in which all of those people disappear?

A longtime friend, a retired computer whiz who was one of the principal architects of the Sabre reservation system that is used by all of our domestic airlines, has suggested the perfect model for transforming our chaotic and outrageously expensive healthcare system into an efficient and affordable system. He suggests that we design the basic “architecture” of universal healthcare by first doing it to the lawyers… Oops! I should say, by converting our broken and outrageously expensive legal system into an effective and affordable justice system, which actually provides equal protection of the law for every citizen… as our Founding Fathers intended.

Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment contains what is referred to as the “equal protection” clause. It says, in part, that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Nowhere does it say that a citizen is guaranteed equal protection of the law… only if he/she has the financial resources to purchase the services of an intermediary who has gone to school to learn the intricacies of manipulating or circumventing the law.

Logically, the first step in developing a universal justice system would be to make all lawyers employees of the state in which they are licensed to practice. They and their legal assistants would be provided office facilities in state-owned office buildings and compensated out of funds appropriated by the legislatures. Those who choose to practice in the arena of federal law would be compensated under the federal Civil Service System. Salaries in the legal profession would be commensurate with those in other professions, such as science, engineering, journalism, academia, accounting, etc. There would be no more multi-million dollar contingency fees.

Those persons, organizations, or corporations involved in disputes requiring legal remediation would make application for representation to a government legal services office. Disputes of a civil nature (tort law) requiring simple finding of fact, arbitration, and determination of liability would be assigned to general practitioners, while those of a more complicated nature, requiring special knowledge and experience in specific areas of the law… taxes, corporate law, intellectual properties, anti-trust, etc… would be assigned to attorneys with the appropriate legal specialty.

To insure that the universal justice system would not become a burden to the taxpayers, and to insure that complainants would not use the system as a means of unfairly enriching themselves at the expense of others, the courts would operate under the British “loser pays” system wherein unsuccessful litigants would be required to pay court costs, in addition to any punitive and actual damages awarded by the court.

To avoid any repeats of the O.J. Simpson debacle, juries would be drawn from a pool of paid professionals (peers) comprised of retired senior citizens, all of whom would be required to demonstrate a record of at least fifty consecutive years free of conviction for any offense greater than a traffic violation.

The creation of a universal healthcare system, such as those recommended by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, could easily bankrupt the nation and destroy whatever positive aspects now exist. None of the plans trotted out by Democrats or Republicans hinge on creating economies, reducing waste and inefficiency, or eliminating non-productive overhead… a fatal flaw.

The lessons learned in transforming our dysfunctional and outrageously expensive legal system could later be applied to the transformation of our equally dysfunctional and outrageously expensive healthcare system. In a nation with far too many lawyers and far too few physicians, I vote we first practice on the lawyers.