Whether healthcare is a right or a privilege, everybody deserves to live.

In America, we have less doctors per population than about 25% of the rest of the world. The majority of our disease cost and hospital bed time is from controllable diseases like heart disease or type 2 diabetes. In countries where universal healthcare exists and thrives, their biggest health concerns are age related disease like dementia or less controllable diseases like cancer. Their access to and availability of doctors is more bountiful as well. To put it short, while the U.S should treat healthcare as a right. We don’t exactly have the means to efficiently do so and it’s not as easy as printing money to pay for the system to grow or creating laws where doctor availability falls short. The U.S’s biggest health concerns aren’t age related, they’re habit related. We have less doctors per 1,000 people than 51 other countries ahead of us by that measurement.

Now just because we don’t have universal healthcare today and can’t snap our fingers to make it happen tomorrow, doesn’t mean we can’t create changes as a society and within the industry itself to build a universal healthcare system over time. How do we do It? Well we can start by giving patients a platform for communication and negotiation. We can give patients full ownership and sovereignty over their data. We can tailor this platform around making doctors and medical staff jobs less time consuming. We let patients benefit from their data sales to curb medical expenses. We can create incentives for patients following preventative care measures to produce data and even passive income. We empower patients and make medical staff jobs less hard, allowing doctors and patients to meet halfway. We take away the redundancy’s of medical staff asking the same questions to speed up clinic time and diminish the security issues medical facilities face, by putting patients in charge of their data. We integrate AI as a tool for doctors to help identify diseases and anticipate potential disease developing. We can build comprehensive health plans for patients that allows them to communicate with their doctors remotely anywhere in the world. We give patients negotiating room in their insurance premium costs and finally build some grounds for patients to make their voices heard in the healthcare industry.

We grow as a industry in a country that’s diving into a 3 trillion dollar healthcare industry head deep. Healthcare is adding more jobs than any other sector and projected to follow that for years to come. While we increase our amount of doctors and broaden availability to care, we must also stop treating patients like just numbers and give them their platform in the industry to engage as a collective entity. Unity Health Score aims to be a platform that helps provide that entity.

We can’t just blame big business for putting profits before patients. We also must take into account systematic bureaucracies of government regulations meeting the free market in an industry where one mishap can make a company fail and directly impact everybody it’s providing care for, even while they’re seeing profits.

The healthcare industry doesn’t need to be disrupted. You can’t disrupt something that’s already in a constant state of disruption. It needs a grass roots patient platform. Regardless of whether that’s built by a combined effort of Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway. An already established medical tech company. Or a new seeding phase startup. The healthcare industry needs to evolve. It needs to adapt to it’s environmental pressures and stresses. It needs a collective effort of big business, small business, doctors, insurance providers, researchers, and patients to engage in building a better model.

Universal healthcare in the united states can definitely be attained, but it won’t come easy. It will develop over time with consistent effort from patients and everyone involved in healthcare. Everyone deserves to live and nobody in their right mind argues against that case, regardless of what side of the spectrum they're on, if they believe healthcare is a right or privilege. When it comes to giving everyone their chance at life, it’s the logistics in how we provide care, it’s the costs, it’s the availability of doctors, it’s the industry’s workload and capabilities of providing services that truly boils down to how we solve issues in healthcare. What we need to focus on shouldn’t just be the laws and regulations but the operations and manners in which business is conducted in healthcare too.