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There is No Justifying the American Healthcare System.

No more excuses for the maintenance of a system so fundamentally unjust.

Lauren Elizabeth
3 min readAug 13, 2019
Photo via Hush Naidoo on Unsplash

I was fortunate enough to grow up relatively healthy.

Other than a diagnosis of Kawasaki Disease when I was three, and a genetic condition that will likely cause a lot of health problems for me later on down the line, I’ve been lucky. Even then, I still learned early on how ugly our health insurance system can be.

At eleven years old, my parents told me that the insurance company was not going to cover a drug that — due to my genetic condition — my body required in order to function the way it was supposed to. They said there was nothing left to do, other than try writing a letter that would come from me personally.

At the time, I didn’t really think anything of it. I wrote the letter, and a few weeks later the drug was covered. I didn’t know then how fundamentally wrong it was for an eleven year old to have to sit down and write a letter to an insurance company asking them to pay for a drug that my body needed in order to function correctly. I didn’t know then that I was one of the lucky ones. I didn’t know that it didn’t have to be that way.

Most of us have seen either firsthand or know of someone who has dealt with the…

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Lauren Elizabeth
Lauren Elizabeth

Written by Lauren Elizabeth

Lauren is a writer & leftist with analysis on topics related to politics & policy. She can be reached at LaurenMartinchek@gmail.com or Twitter @xlauren_mx

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